The Arrogant Gamer

Aion: Impressions from Closed Betas #4 and 5

2009-08-03T18:08:00.000-06:00

It's been a few hours since the server shutdown commemorating the end of the 5th closed beta test for Aion, and as of right now, my thoughts on the game are somewhere between cautiously optimistic and enthusiastic. On the one hand, the game didn't seem to have anything particularly compelling. In damn near 20 levels (out of the maximum 50), I didn't find one thing that hasn't been done in another game. On the other hand, the only time I felt genuinely let down was when I discovered that flying is constrained to a few select areas. The game has been going strong in Asia for quite some time now, and it really shows; despite being a beta, the only flaws I could find were related to the localization.

In beta #4, I spent most of my time playing an Elyos sorcerer. Sorcs are the glass cannon of the game, and the class certainly delivers on both fronts. The kind of damage that a sorc can dish out is jaw-dropping, and it comes equipped with the standard compliment of control and escape spells to (hopefully) avoid getting your squishy ass blown up in 5 seconds (not an exaggeration). The class plays like a mixture of a WoW mage and a Guild Wars elementalist, with a good blend of nukes and instant casts. Like all classes, the sorcerer utilizes various ability chains, which is (imo) a much more effective way of limiting the power of various abilities. For instance, early on, you receive an instant cast, 30 second cooldown spell which does decent damage and knocks your target down, but it can only be used within a few seconds of your 2 second cast ice nuke/snare. The class was fun, but too fragile for my tastes.

In beta #5, I played a gladiator, which is a warrior of the no-frills, smash stuff with a 2-hander variety. The class makes much more extensive use of the ability chains than the sorc; by level 19 I had two different 3-move chains. One interesting aspect of the class is that you actually make a solid tank while wielding a 2-hander, thanks to the ridiculous amount of parry that the two handed swords and polearms have innately. I'm sure the class won't be a viable main tank in endgame PvE, but for leveling, a gladiator gets the job done just fine. Damage output was also quite respectable, and the class has a variety of knockdowns. I have a feeling that this will be one of the mainstay classes in PvP.

The crytek engine ensures that the game looks relentlessly pretty while still running on my 5 year old computer (albeit barely). Even with the bare minimum detail settings and a resolution below my monitor's native 1680x1050, this is the best looking MMO I have ever seen.

Zone layout and quest design felt very solid overall. Things progressed at a natural rate, and there was only one time where I ran out of quests and had to grind out monsters for half a level. Quests are the standard "kill X of Y and then talk to Z" that we've all come to know and love, but they were well organized and rarely felt tedious. Quest hubs were well dispersed and easy to find. Also, in a stunningly intelligent move, the game can locate virtually any NPC or "pick this up off the ground" item for you, eliminating the need to alt-tab into a browser window to look up the location of that quest goal who's location was not adequately explained in the text. Levels came on at a slow but satisfying pace, and each level up brought a noticeable and rewarding boost in power.

Flying is a ton of fun, and you can do it within your first few hours of playing. Even in the zones where you can't fly freely, you can still jump off a tall object and glide around for a good amount of time. The control felt natural, and I have high hopes for the aerial combat, though I have yet to really experience it.

One pleasant surprise was a lack of instances. Perhaps they are there at higher levels, but there was not a single one in the first two zones for either race. If things stay that way, I think that the endgame could be very promising; WoW largely lost its charm for me when Blizzard started instancing everything under the sun. If NCsoft manages to cultivate the sort of spontaneous, open-world PvP that used to happen in WoW, they would have at least one happy subscriber.

Of course, the game is not without its drawbacks. The style is typically East Asian. Women are cute and girly, men are slightly less cute and girly, armor for both genders is revealing and feminine, and the animations are hugely over-the-top. I prefer a more gothic* style to my fantasy games personally, although the azn-a-rific styling isn't enough to put me off of a game by itself.

Also, as mentioned, the flying is disappointingly limited. I had assumed that a game which advertises the fact that your character can fly would actually let the player, you know, fly. Instead, the vast majority of the areas I encountered would only allow you to glide off of a high point. The reason is obvious, of course: players would bypass content if they could fly everywhere. But to my mind, this kind of reasoning represents the height of developer arrogance. If people are bypassing your content, then the solution is to make better content that your players won't want to bypass. I bought this game in part because I liked the idea of 3D combat, and it was disappointing to see such a good concept be so under-utilized.

The UI is also barely adequate. It certainly looks nice, but the functionality feels very hacked-together. Even in the default configuration, it is common to have important displays covering each other up.

Additionally, while it may be seen as a good thing to some (and I am of a more or less neutral opinion on the matter), the game starts to become very unfriendly to solo play in the late teens. This was a bigger problem in the beta than it will be on live, since the developers had global channels (including the looking for group channel) disabled, and the LFG interface is pretty poor.

And finally, the in-game auction house is mediocre, at best. It lacks any sort of powerful search system, forcing you to sort through 20 or 30 pages of low level stuff to find things you might want to use. On top of that, there is a limit of roughly a dozen items that you can put up for auction at any given time. This limit is somewhat compensated for by the fact that you can list something for sale to other players directly from your inventory, however effectively using this feature requires you to idle in a busy area, lagging the place up for anyone trying to get something done.

On the whole, though, the game was enjoyable. I'm hoping to make it to the abyss in the final closed beta, so that I can see whether the PvP is worth the price of admission, but on the whole, I feel that my pre-order was money well spent.

*As in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art, not the pussy kids that dress up like vampires.

Why I will always be a PC gamer

2009-07-03T22:50:00.004-06:00

People have been decrying the end of the PC as a gaming platform since the original Playstation was released (and probably even before that). Looking at the current generation of titles, it isn't hard to see why; there are precious few AAA PC-exclusive titles, and the power of the current generation of consoles has hit the point where you really can't tell that PC physics/graphics/etc. are "better" without a lot of scrutiny. And the increasing multimedia capability in machines that, even at the high end, are cheaper than a new gaming PC, makes the price gap harder to justify. Hell, you can buy an Xbox 360 for the same price as a new mid-range videocard.

But despite all of this, there is one critical thing PCs have that no console will ever possess: an open platform. The PC is not controlled by any one company, and is sold with the intention that the user will have a very great deal of control over how the hardware and software is used. With the advent of the internet, this capability is, to me, the defining feature of the PC as an entertainment platform. User-made content such as mods, additional levels, new skins, widescreen patches, and more help add longevity to today's titles, and can breathe new life into the classics of yesterday.

As an illustration, let me talk about my current replay of Final Fantasy VII. This is one of the classics of gaming, and yet the PC version is practically the definition of "shitty console port"; the graphical options are severely limited, the music is done in horrible-sounding MIDI, and several areas of the game still bear the Playstation's circle-X-square-triangle button designations. The videos are forced to run off of the CD, leading to some nasty lag in the game when one of the hundreds of FMVs is queued up. Worst of all, the minigames lack a CPU limiter, so on a modern computer, they run so fast as to be unplayable (the motorcycle game can be over in a matter of seconds)! The game was widely panned solely on the basis of this sloppy porting job. And yet, for the PC gamer with an internet connection, some time spent googling, and a bit of patience, the game today is better than the PS1 version!

Fans of this classic, especially the community over at Qhimm, have done marvelous work restoring and enhancing the game. Some quick poking through the registry revealed that the path to the videos can be altered, allowing you to copy and paste the files from the CD to your hard drive, giving instant load times. The old 640x480 max resolution has been obliterated by an ingenious hack that allows for any resolution you could possibly want, even widescreen (albeit of the "black bars on the side" variety). Another program allows you to replace the low quality MIDI music with either the original Playstation music files, or your own set of MP3s (say, a CD rip of the original soundtrack, which sounds gorgeous). Think the game is too easy? There are hard mode mods. Think the 9999 limit is bogus? That can be hacked away. Hate the blocky, no-hand models on the field map? There's a hack to replace the main characters with their battle models, and some players have even started an ambitious project to completely re-make every NPC model with a higher polygon count. There's also a mod that just adds hands. There's even a project to add a full voice script. All this on top of the dozen or so fixes for the shitty porting job. None of these patches requires anything more intimidating than editing a text file or modifying a few registry keys.

There are countless other such hacks, fixes, and projects out there, for a myriad of PC games. Any title with enough fans likely has a similar community out there, keeping their favorite games alive and poking around to find ways to enhance them. This kind of thing simply isn't possible on a closed platform like a console, and it never will be unless Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo want to give up their hardware monopoly (not likely).

And that is why the PC will remain not just a viable platform, but a great one. And also why it will continue to be my platform of choice.

EVE Update

2009-06-27T12:32:00.003-06:00

Atlas, Sc0rched Earth, and the Curse coalition have pretty much broken the once mighty Red Alliance, capturing their home system of C-J6MT, and locking down untold billions worth of assets in the process. Admitidly, our efforts were assisted greatly by a failed internal coup, but given the progress we had been making in Insmother, that only accelerated the inevitable. With KenZoku finnaly out of the picture, Goonswarm and Pandemic Legion (mostly PL) are now starting to bring us the fights that our pilots have been hungry for. So hungry, in fact, that they took a sniper BS gang that was lacking in support out to fight a PL sniper HAC gang. Oops.

It will be interesting to see see what happens to the political landscape now. Already, the drone regions have gone through a bit of a shakeup, with XIX resetting Intrepid Crossing and Etherial Dawn. And while nobody ever believed the NC/Goon/PL NAP-fest when they said they would reset each other after BoB/KenZoku were dead, stranger things have happened. The only thing that makes me nervous is seeing how Atlas will fare on the defensive. We have proven to be quite the powerhouse on the offensive, to the point that we literally scared away most of the fights we could have gotten in Detorid and Insmother. But we are fairly untested in defending space, and most of our recent acquisitions are not yet fortified.

On the carebear front, my Caldari missioning alt is finally through with level 1 missions, and is now owning the hell out of level 2s in a pimped-out Caracal that I haven't even insured because 3/4ths of the value is in the modules. I must say, I really enjoy the change of pace that pounding through a few missions can provide. It is also pretty crazy what a huge difference all the tech II modules make; missions that broke the tank on my poor little Maller can't even drop the passive shield tank on my Caracal below 40%. I can't wait to see what a Drake will be able to do.

Morality in Gaming

2009-06-18T06:00:00.000-06:00

Ever since KotOR and Fable hit the scene, it seems like morality systems have been all the rage, especially in RPGs. Unfortunately, very few games ever really do it well, and the end result is a distinct feeling that the developers saw it as a cheap way to add replay value. The reason is twofold. First, most moral choices are annoyingly black and white; either you send an orphaned kitten to college, or you punt him across the room for no good reason. Protip: If all your dialogue options look exactly the same, with one obviously good, one neutral, and one obviously evil choice, then you need to come up with some more creative dialogue choices (I'm looking at you, Mass Effect). Nuance is what makes moral choices interesting, and in an RPG, it is essential if you want to allow your players the freedom to play a character that is interesting to them. The various D&D based games are usually better about this, since they have the law/chaos distinction alongside good/evil, but most other games pretty fall flat. Even on my recent playthrough of KotOR, I found the good/evil distinction blatantly apparent in 95% of the situations I faced, and rarely did it present the option that I would have liked to choose.

The other problem is the lack of impact that your decisions may have. Most games will have almost exactly the same story, regardless of what choices you make. Fable II at least made an attempt at changing this, but most games don't even bother. When playing on the darker side, I often find myself wondering why I'm fighting this evil guy all the time, when it would be much easier to ally with him, and then betray him at a convinient moment. Not only would it be a lot easier than having to cut my way through his entire fucking army single-handedly, but it would also let me use him to take out those who would be my biggest opposition once I sieze power for myself. But instead, I get stuck with the good-guy's storyline, and as a consolation I can be a huge prick all throughout it. To be fair, some games do add some epic "betray the good guys" scenes (KotOR and NWN2 are extremely well done in that regard), but they're always at or near the end, too late to have a meaningful impact on the story.

A side effect of this is a tendancy towards extremely watered-down options. Since allowing a player to be too good or too evil would totally throw the storyline off, such actions aren't allowed, and the result is that being good mostly amounts to giving money to beggars, and being evil mostly involves holding them up for whatever they have left. The good guy always talks his way through a problem, while the bad guy uses force etc., etc. Additionally, the biggest sacrifices that a good player has to make usually amount to something completely trivial, like a sum of money or a cool item, while the biggest punishment for being evil is most often having to act like a brat half the time so that you don't accidently swing your alignment towards good, and/or enduring lectures from your more light-minded comrades.

And on that note, it seems like Fallout 3 is the first game since Baulder's Gate II to limit your companions based on your alignment. It never ceases to amaze me what atrocities a good-aligned NPC will help me commit, and all without offering more than a dissparoving snippet of dialogue in protest.

To be frank, I wish most games would stop mucking about with big-picture morality, and just focus on doing one branch of the story well. Mass Effect did a good job of this, by offering a character that was obviously good, but giving the player the option to choose what kind of a good guy he would be.

I <3 Dwarf Fortress

2009-06-16T09:26:00.004-06:00

I know I bullet-pointed this game in my back-from-the-internet-dead post, but after watching several hours disappear yesterday, I feel it deserves more than that.

For the uninitiated, go read about Boatmurdered, then go play through this tutorial. Or if you're the just-jump-in type, download it directly from the Bay 12 site.

This is probably the first game that I have ever had to watch myself to make sure it didn't ruin my life. I never missed a commitment to play EVE, never sold my blood to pay for my WoW habit, but I'll be damned if I didn't start playing DF one saturday night and didn't stop until I started hearing birds chirping outside my window and realized it was 5 AM. It is that enthralling.

DF is sandbox gaming in its purest form; it gives you a world, some dwarves, and a few supplies, and then says "have fun". Fun can be finding hilarious things to do, like equipping every noble's quarters with a "mandate lever" that floods their room with water/magma/captured goblins. Alternately, some people will have their dwarves create some impressive meagconstructions. Or if you're OCD, you can try to build the perfect fort for whatever it is you want to do.

In an ordinary game, seeing "losing is fun" in the in-game help would raise alarm bells, but that's because those games have neither dwarves nor fortresses. If a miner gets pissed off, it is not uncommon for him to grab his pick and go on a killing spree. If one of the guys that he murders has a friend that was already on edge, he may then decide to go off some dwarves as well. This can quickly spiral out of control, especially if your population is already on edge from some other problem. Or you could simply have a doomsday device blow up in your face (your fort does have a doomsday device, right?). But however you go out, failures will often result in stories ranging from mildly amusing to "it hurts to laugh, but I can't stop".

In short, this is the kind of game that has been left behind in the modern era of mass marketing and insanely powerful 3D accelerators; it is a game that is made not to tell a story, sell an engine, or to provide a venue for competition, but simply something to be played and enjoyed.

Diablo is Overrated

2009-06-11T06:00:00.001-06:00

There, I said it. Overrated. Two entertaining but forgettable entries in a genre that is now packed to the brim with imitators. Maybe I just don't "get it", but believe me I've tried. I've played through Diablo II's first act no fewer than three times, with a different class each on each go. None of these attempts made it past act 2 before succumbing to boredom.

How a basic hack-n-slash with simplistic character customization ever became so popular will probably always remain a mystery to me. To be sure, it is fairly well put together, with visuals that have stood the test of time, and straightforward, no-nonsense gameplay. But it usually takes something more than that for a game to be considered a phenomenon. Starcraft is widely regarded as the gold standard for competitive games, yet it still remains accessable and enjoyable for a newcomer. Half-Life still has one of the most compelling universes and storylines of any FPS ever made, plus it has so many mods that you could be playing for years off of a single purchase. Halo takes a great deal of the responsibility for bringing online multiplayer and the entire FPS genre into console mainstream. Even World of Warcraft managed to establish that an MMORPG doesn't have to be a thing created only for the hardcore.

The best thing that can be said for Diablo is that its "play a zillion times until that one item you really want finally drops" mechanic served as the core for World of Warcraft. But the thing is, that is all Diablo has going for it: the addiction factor. The story is pathetic for something that carries the RPG moniker, the character designs are unoriginal D&D knockoffs, and just about any problem you encounter can be solved with more grinding. Even the different difficulty levels are an admission of this fact; they simply ramp up the numerical challenge factor, allowing you to play the same game again, but with a higher level character.

Really, the only non-pedestrian aspect of the gameplay is the random world that is generated for each playthrough. But there's a reason that few modern games have such a feature: a random algorhithm will never be able to make a beautiful and rememberable map with the same frequency as a team of artists working closely with a group of level designers.

To me, the game seems to be the equivalent of a masterfully crafted, jewel-inlaid chalice. Sure, it's pretty, and yeah, it was a part of history. But it's still just a fucking cup, stop treating it like a Beethoven symphony.

Hellstorm in Detorid

2009-06-09T09:20:00.004-06:00

Since Thursday, Atlas, along with friendlies from Aggression, Cult of War, Krautbreak, and Minor Threat, have been laying absolute waste to Detorid, with minimal resistance. On two separate occasions, Atlas has hit the 256 man fleet cap, and we have had over 100 capitals on the field for multiple ops. This is in stark contrast to our invasion of Omist, where 150 in fleet was considered a good turnout.

As of this post, it has been 11 days since we first started this campaign, and Atlas has killed 117 towers, 163 battleships, 33 dreadnoughts, and countless support ships. Oh yeah, and a titan. In addition, we successfully secured the 1V-LI2 system, which until now had not been captured for roughly 3 years. Our enemies have untold billions worth of assets in that system, which they have now lost access to. I lost my trusty battlecruiser in the process, but that was a pretty small price to pay.

It will be interesting to see the reaction from Goons and the NC. It seems pretty clear that nobody expected the east to heat up like this. Atlas leadership has done a good job of keeping the enemy firmly on the defensive, and we have built up considerable momentum. With xdeath banished back to the dronelands, and RA still under heavy pressure on their northern border from Intrepid Crossing and Ethereal Dawn, it seems pretty clear that they will need to call in backup if they want to put a halt to our advance, let alone push us back. Our pilots have been spoiling for a fight, and the battle for 1V-LI2 did little to satiate our blood lust. Hopefully, the next time NC sends backup for their Russian friends, they won't run headlong into some AAA titans.

Just One More™

2009-06-04T06:00:00.000-06:00

ATLAS has been busy as of late. It was recently decided that the Detorid region had lived under the oppressive Legion of xxxXXXxxxXXXDEATHXXXxxxXXXxxxXXXxxxXXXxxx, ruling as goon proxies, for long enough. It was time to liberate those systems, for freedom's sake!

Over the weekend, the enemy turned out in force, calling in backup from Red Alliance and Pandemic Legion to field some impressive capital fleets, but since the start of the month, there has been pretty much zero resistance, which has allowed us to kill over 50 enemy towers, and put another ~30 into reinforced mode, and as I write this, our capital fleet is shooting another, to the commonly recurring phrase "come on guys, we've just got one more tower to shoot in here."

This is also coming on the heals of our collaboration with Aggression that has pretty much evicted United Legion from the Immensea region.

My only complaint is that the southeast is starting to turn pretty blue now, but on the plus side that means that we will probably be heading west to join Kenzoku and friends in the fight to kick goonswarm out of 0.0, once we finish up here.

All in all, a good time to be playing.

EVE Online (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet Spaceships)

2009-06-02T08:00:00.000-06:00

I have previously written about this game. I thought that perhaps if the early game were better, then I would be able to stick with things long enough to hit the epic endgame of 0.0 space warfare. This thought is why I didn't enjoy it. EVE isn't like any other MMO I've played; it doesn't obey the pattern set forth by Everquest and (arguably) perfected with WoW. So, if you want to enjoy it, you have to forget everything you know about MMORPGs. Character advancement is never ending, so the concept of a level-capped "endgame" is meaningless. People who use the best gear in PvP are not gods, they just have more isk than brains*. Nearly everything is player-driven. Bigger does not necessarily mean better, and nearly every ship can play a useful role in a fight. Once I got these concepts through my brain, the game seemed to change.

So how did I wind up in New Eden? It began with introduction of the new honor system in the 2.0 patch of WoW. Open-world PvP had been struggling, but was still reasonably healthy up until that point. But that patch finally pushed things over the edge. With the mass emigration of PvP into instanced areas died the sense of danger and excitement that came from living on a PvP server. This was what had really gotten me hooked on the game; the idea that a mundane activity like picking herbs could (and often did) turn into a brawl at the drop of a hat was thrilling. As time went on, I found other things I enjoyed, but they were all transient, and somehow the game always felt as empty as the Aezeroth that now served as merely a connection between instances.

Fast forward a few years. With the realization that WAR is just not going to run on my computer behind me, I am now in the early weeks of my third attempt to get into EVE. I had recently joined up with the now-defunct Eth3real corporation, and had gotten a taste of 0.0 up in the Venal region (before Morsus Mihi came and booted us out). The entire area was crawling with hostiles, and it was an adventure just moving beyond the two or three systems that we had staked a claim to. I had had my first taste of fear in years, and it was glorious.

But what really hooked me was when we were back into empire space and I got to turn the tables. A small group of us got together in a high security system with some cheap destroyers, fit for raw damage. We waited in a safe spot a few thousand km away from an asteroid belt, where a guy was peacefully mining, blissfully unaware of our intentions. When the signal was given, we all warped in right on top of him, and blew up his fancy mining ship, with a 9-figure price tag, before getting ourselves blown up by CONCORD, the EVE equivalent of town guards. Our total loss was under 10 million. This immediately brought back fond memories of my glory days in WoW; ganking people in BRM, wiping people doing elemental dukes in silithus, destroying people in Ironforge and the deeprun tram. Here at last was a game with the kind of hardcore PvP that I had been missing for years. Nowhere and nobody was ever truely safe.

A few months later, I somehow managed to get my ass into one of the largest alliances in the game, ATLAS. Given my newbie status, I really have no business being here, but I sure as hell don't want to leave. I wound up on the right side of the current conflict rampaging through new eden between Goonswarm (think /b/tards, only not funny) and their pets, and the alliance of Band of Brothers, Against All Authorities, ATLAS, and others. I'm fighting alongside some awesome human beings (and a few people that are even more retarded than I am) against a foe that is dedicated to victory by any means necessary, no matter how dishonorable. At stake is not just a rating or a title, but the essential resources that fuel the war effort, and our home space itself.

None of it is scripted, none of it is instanced, and none of it will get reset in the interest of "leveling the playing field". Fuck your battlegrounds, fuck your epic loot, fuck games that don't really start until 6 months in. I'm through fighting a long and epic battle that somehow manages to have absolutely no consequences on the game world. I have an internet spaceship now, and I am loving it.

*Note that this can mean that the player is either rich but terrible, or that they are actually pretty good, but are richer than god himself. Thankfully, the first is far more common than the second

Left4Dead 2

2009-06-01T22:42:00.004-06:00

Valve's announcement of this game has left me horribly torn. On the one hand, it looks like everything the original L4D should have been. It has chainsaws, daylight, and a better variety of special infected, including witches that are (reportedly) tough to deal with. The new cast of characters doesn't seem to have quite the same charm, but then again all we have to go off of is a few short trailers. RPS has a hands-on preview, and I found myself sharing their enthusiasm.

On the other hand, this is what the original L4D should have been. Coming only a year later, after a release that was short on content to begin with (and noticeably chainsaw-free), it feels distinctly un-Valve-like. I expect other studios to push out a half-finished game and then charge again once they release the fully polished "sequel", but until now Valve has been above that kind of crap.

Now, I'm not going to say that the original L4D isn't a great game in its own right, because it is. But really, I'm left feeling like a bit of a sucker now. The short development cycle makes it painfully obvious that another 6 months could have given us an irate Francis cleaving apart a Charger with his trusty axe. Not only would I have waited another half-year, but I would even be willing to throw down a 20 for the new content that L4D 2 is set to deliver. But a full priced game? "I hate blatant cash-grabs."

Rumors of my demise...

2009-05-28T13:08:00.003-06:00

Sometimes you sign up for 17 hours of class thinking you will have an above-average workload, only to discover that the two 1-credit labs you have actually demand 3 credits' worth of work. Ah, the joys of a science major.

Anyway, here's 6 months' worth of posts, condensed down to a series of bullet points:

WAR is a fun game, but their shitty fucking code means that I can't do large scale keep sieges or any of the higher rank scenarios on my aging dinosaur of a computer. Subscription Canceled.
Fable II puts the "RP" back into RPGs, and that makes me a happy nerd.
Portal is the best puzzle game ever.
Team Fortress 2 kicks ass, but I suck at it. ='(
EVE can actually be a lot of fun, but you can't treat it like an everquest-type game. Also, you need to be borderline OCD and not afraid to lose your shit (more on this in another post).
Left 4 Dead is awesome. In face, pretty much anything with a Valve logo would be worth buying even at twice the price.
World War II shooters need to die.
Aion: Tower of Eternity looks potentially sweet.
Even though I'll get pissed and stop playing for a month because some emo pretty-boy asshat villain has to be killed half a dozen times before it sticks, and the character that I based my entire playstyle around will get kidnapped/imprisoned/killed, I will still buy and play Final Fantasy XIII when it hits shelves.
Mass Effect is one game where I would actually be happy to see a near endless train of sequels.
If your epic boss fight requires nullifying a specific playstyle in order to be challenging, then you fail as a game designer. If it relies on numerical challenge, you get a D-.
I am on a self-imposed dwarf fortress ban, because otherwise it would ruin my life. This game is proof that a good idea and solid execution are all you really need to make a fun game.
David Sirlin's article on the scrub is a must read, if for some reason you haven't yet. In fact, the entire Playing to Win series is great, and it now comes in book form.

Annnnd that's about it.

I Hate Texas Hold 'em

2008-11-04T06:00:00.001-07:00

This poker variant has somehow risen from obscurity to fame, and in the process has pretty much become synonymous with poker. It seems that the worst variants of a card game tend to rise to the top, for reasons that would probably make a good topic for a psychological study. For instance, you know solitaire? What you're thinking of is actually a specific solitaire game generally called Klondike. It sucks, because it is based more on luck than skill, with a significant percentage of games dealt being impossible to win no matter how good you are. Imagine if one out of every three times you loaded up a skirmish in Starcraft, the computer strolled over to your base 5 seconds into the game with a dozen carriers. That is Klondike.

Texas Hold 'em is similarly terrible. For argument's sake, let's compare Texas Hold 'em to the once popular, now quaint five-card draw (I'm going to assume you know the rules. If not, just fucking google them). In Texas Hold 'em, you know 7 of the (8 + 2 * #ofplayers) cards in play. In 5-card draw, all you know is 5 out of the (5 * #ofplayers + #cardsdiscarded) cards in play. Basically, even if nobody discards any cards, you still know less about the cards in play in five card draw (for 2 players, 5/10 versus 7/12. and the disparity only gets greater from there). More importantly, you know a great deal less about what possible hands your opponent has (5/7 cards for hold 'em, 0/5 for five-card). The result: Texas Hold 'em is much easier to "game" by knowing statistics, while 5-card forces you to think a bit more about what your opponents are doing.

Essentially, hold 'em sucks because it removes a great deal of the chance and psychology from the game, replacing it with simple rules like "stand on pocket faces or 4/7". A great deal of the fun in poker comes from learning to read the people you play with regularly- learning their little tics or knowing that they tend to bluff when they're down on chips. Similarly, you have to weigh the huge unknowns when making your choices. If you get dealt 4 hearts, do you check, then discard that pesky spade in hopes of making it big (but broadcasting to your opponents that you didn't have squat before the discard), bluff like a madman in hopes that nobody else got anything good to start with, or fold since you've got shit and only a 25% chance of having a decent hand? All these things, of course, do exist in hold 'em, but in a muted, boring sort of way. Oh look, he's betting big, he must have pocket face cards. Oh look, now ace-2-3 went down on the flop, but he's still betting big. Either he's a goddamn idiot, or he's bluffing.

Now, these shortcomings wouldn't matter too much normally. Let the stats geeks who can't keep a straight face play hold 'em, while people who are more passionate about poker play better variants. Live and let live, right?

Except nobody plays anything except texas hold 'em. Ever. At this point, I don't even think most people know that there are other kinds of poker out there, they just watch sunglass-clad people on ESPN2 play hold 'em at the "World Series of Poker" (on another note, can we please stop stealing sports terms for non-sporting events? I thought there were people who got paid to be creative about this shit...), and assume that that's all there is to the game. Texas Hold 'em has wrapped its insidious tendrils around poker as a whole, and squeezed all the fun out of the game. And most people don't even know what they're missing out on.

To continue my Starcraft analogy (because it's a particularly good one), Texas Hold 'em is like a map with bases on opposing sides, and there is only fog of war on a strip through the center third of the map. Sure, you don't know exactly when your opponent will strike, or from where, but you can get a pretty good idea, and so can he. Start zerg rushing? Your opponent can see it coming and will be able to counter you easily. Obviously, most people wouldn't want to play such a map, because it eliminates most of the fun and challenge inherent in fighting an unknown opponent.

And yet you idiots keep insisting on Texas Hold 'em whenever you play poker.

Bioware's new Star Wars MMO

2008-10-30T06:00:00.001-06:00

It would be fair to say that I am eagerly anticipating the recently announced Star Wars: The Old Republic. It has Bioware at the helm, which alone merits it a great deal of attention. But there is a lot more. Bioware is shooting for a much more immersive, story-driven MMO, without the menial "kill 50 boars, then bring me 15 vulture gizzards" quests that have become integral to the modern MMORPG paradigm. Essentially, it sounds like they're shooting for KOTOR, but in a persistent, multiplayer world. If they pull it off, they could have a top-tier MMO on their hands, one that may even (dare I say it) rival WoW.

There are a lot of juicy details circulating on various gaming news websites (several of which you can find over to the right), so I'm not going to bother repeating them all here, but there are a few that I think bear some rampant, almost completely unfounded speculation:

-NPC companions: This is one of the biggest things that intrigues me about the game. Right now, all we know is that you will have several customizable companions available as your character advances, but that you can only have one with you at a time. This certainly raises some serious possiblities for storytelling, with the trademark Bioware romance coming immediately to mind. A big weakness with most MMOs is that you lack any real connection to the game world, and thus the story. These companions could provide that missing link. Plus, being able to corrupt a noble jedi into a twisted sith as he fights by your side would be fun, if nothing else.

It would be really neat to see an influence system a la NWN2, which could perhaps be tied to in-game benefits. For instance, Companion A could have conections with the government of a particular system, allowing access to quests and special armor not otherwise available, but A will only put in a good word for somebody she trusts and can vouch for in good faith. While Companion B might have a black market contact that could get you a sweet hookup on some illegal weapons, but only if you're willing to turn on both A and B.

The potential for soloing is also pretty sweet, as you could select a companion with strengths that compliment your weaknesses, and it could add a new layer of depth to PvP, similar to Guild Wars hero battles. And similar to GW heroes, these NPCs should add more depth to character customization, always a good thing in my book.

-Other Classes: Right now, all that has been announced is the obligatory jedi and sith. This begs the question: why would I play anything else? Figuring out a way to balance the various classes while still maintaining the necessary badassery of jedi/sith raises some interesting options: will Bioware provide some sort of specialization system, limiting these characters to being good with their lightsabers, or good with the force, or average at both? Or perhaps there will be a class system similar to Mass Effect, with a few primary archetypes (melee specialist, force-user, tech-specialist, etc.), with jedi/sith being a hybrid combination. This could also pave the way for other interesting hybrids: non-jedi/sith force-users, who stick to blasters and other forms of ranged combat would be interesting to play, for instance. And as for the other classes, the potential seems endless. Specialists in both ranged combat and technology seem like shoe-ins, with a potential for non-lightsaber-wielding melee specialists, non-jedi/sith force users, and hybrids of all the above.

One interesting thing will be how Bioware handles healers. How powerful and prominent will healing be? Will there just be some weak HoTs that get tacked on to a few classes, with character mitigation picking up the slack, or will there be dedicated healers with a full arsenal of abilities? And who will heal? Jedi seem like a pretty obvious candidate, being the only ones with anything akin to magic, and the lore generally gives them pretty potent healing abilities. But a more tech-focused character, armed with various medical kits might also work. Or Bioware could take a really radical step, and not have any healing (or perhaps just some limited self-healing for a few classes). This would make things very interesting indeed, forcing a much more conservative style of combat while allowing for some of the more spectacular jedi abilities (deflecting blaster bolts isn't nearly as powerful when you have no armor and can't be healed up between the hits that do get through).

However, overall, I am still only cautiously optimistic about the game's prospects. For one, it is still in the very early stages, and it could get canceled or severely redesigned between now and release. Also, it has the potential to simply flop, and in more ways that I can count. And a poor release could end up killing it, AoC-style. Quite simply, there is a lot that can go wrong with any game, but much more so with an MMO, where the temptation is to release ASAP and fix it later.

But still, I think this is the first genuinely innovative MMORPG in the post-WoW era that has a real shot at success. I hope it can deliver.

The End of the World (of Warcraft)

2008-10-28T06:00:00.000-06:00

It has been taken as an article of faith for the last few years that Blizzard's MMORPG juggernaut is unstoppable. With (at last count) 10 million active subscriptions, and a second expansion pack due next month, I'd wager that the titan could run strong for another year on inertia alone. For some reason, WoW's success has a sort of aura about it, as if, buried deep in the recesses of the code, there is a subliminal dispenser of some sort of brain heroin. The real reason, of course, is that Blizzard just cranked out another Blizzard game. Their attention to detail, and their ability to create enduring games that appeal to a broad playerbase virtually guaranteed that WoW would be a hit.

But WoW will not stay this big forever, even despite having the seemingly omnipotent Blizzard at the helm. All games fade away, this is fact.

"But," you might be thinking, "no game has even come close to destroying WoW, nothing could possibly take it on!" You would be correct. Just like previous empires that seemed invincible, this one's seeds of destruction will be sown from within by the very people that compose it.

Already it can be seen with the PvE vs. PvP debate. These two disciplines, once linked by the requirement of high-end raid gear, have now separated into two warring factions, each asserting in a cacophony of forum posts that one is somehow actively working to destroy the other. A similar fissure has long ago appeared between the so-called "casuals" and the "hardcore". And among these factions are almost countless sub-factions, divided by class or race or a myriad of other factors, each one shrieking out in unison for more. More dungeons, more maps, more rewards, more buffs, more nerfs, and all of it done exclusively to their own desires.

The fact is that Blizzard cannot keep up with all of this, at least not without sacrificing quality. Balance changes rushed out the door in a vain attempt to placate angry players, ever vigilant with their calculations that show exactly how horrible their class/race/faction/spec/hair style is, how much better everyone else has it. And there has been a dramatic departure from universally enjoyed content like battlegrounds and the old 20-man raids. Instead, we get closely tailored content that its small target audience will enjoy and all others will view with disinterest or disdain. But even this is not enough, no. Lest they run out of content and start angrily chirping at mother Blizzard again, artificial barriers must be put in place to slow progression. Rep grinds, personal ratings, random loot, point grinds, badge grinds, massive gear treadmills, hard barriers to instance progression that are removed with time. All of this detracts from the fun, and builds animosity for those other bastards who caused this problem with their selfish desire for more. If only Blizzard would just ignore those tiny minorities and focus on us, their true customer base, the drivers of their success, their whole raison d'etre! We deserve more, are entitled to it. They do not, are not.

(breathe)

Eventually, niche games will swoop in. We already have the first, with the arrival of WAR, aimed at those of us who enjoyed vanilla WoW's mix of battleground and open-world PvP. There will be more. Each will latch on to one or two of these segments, siphoning off half a million players here, another million there. The combined force of this parasitic onslaught will slowly bleed Blizzard's behemoth away, until only the die-hard WoW fans, the hardcore casual solo raiders who love to gank in arenas across Aezeroth remain.

At that point, I just might renew my subscription.

Get Over Yourselves

2008-10-27T06:00:00.001-06:00

My WoW account still has until mid-November before it expires, so I've been trolling around the forums (mostly my old realm forums, but also some of the class forums). Just today, the latest crop of self-centered whiners has popped up in the paladin forums. This whining is a tradition that has a long and proud history in WoW, starting way back when angry warriors flooded a server with level 1 alts and crashed it. Lately, the whiners have been expressing their dissatisfaction with balancing changes (some of them made on a beta, no less) by making the typical assortment of "account canceled" and other whine threads. Then on Saturday, the moderators made a pass through to clean out the crap (I don't know why they bother, but more power to them for trying). Shortly afterward, gems like these started raining out of already swollen tear ducts:

"it would be cool if you stopped deleting my post pointing out blizzard just pulled a blatant bait and switch scam. 3.0 got many to resubscribe/hold on til wotlk, now they nerf paladins all across the board (not just ret) just in time that wotlk will bring many of them back with hopes of rerolling a DK

hide behind your "online content subject to change" tagline, you are still scumbags when it comes to customer service"

"Nothing better to solve a rush of "civil disobedience" than tactics that belong in an Aldous Huxley novel.

1984 must've been a typo."

"Why are you deleting just the posts of people who are upset about the nerfs but yet you do not delete %#!*@**s who come into this forum trolling and fanning the flames? That just shows you do not give a rats ass about the paladin community."

Shut the fuck up and get over yourselves. This kind of selfish whiny bitching is gradually killing the game (more on that Tuesday!), and you totally wipe out any respectability for your position by comparing a deleted post to censorship by a totalitarian regime. You have no free-speech on a privately owned message board, and all your tears were preventing any sort of reasonable discussion from occurring. It'd be nice if Blizzard's moderators would hand out bans for this kind of crap, but just deleting them does a massive service to anyone with a brain who was reading the forums. It wouldn't be so bad if these people would actually quit, but apparently most of them exist to whine, and so they keep paying and posting, their threats growing emptier the more they try to become self-made martyrs.

This is why I'm glad WAR doesn't have official forums. The community is bad enough without a giant, official echo chamber for all the scrubs and children to spout their drivel.

Playing Halo With Girls

2008-10-23T06:00:00.001-06:00

Women who play "serious" video games are, regrettably, rare. Sure, you find the occasional person who manages to kick ass without a Y chromosome (My old WoW guild leader was one such example), but given that half the population of this planet is female, you'd expect to find more.

Part of this is gender socialization, of course. Video games are for boys, and that is heavily re-enforced through testosterone-fueled design and marketing. But after sitting down and playing Halo with some wimminfolk, I think I may have identified another culprit: Modern games are hard.

This may seem a strange statement, especially referring to Halo. After all, Halo is the quintessential pick-up video game at all kinds of social gatherings. But then a friend of mine amazed me with her total inability to run and shoot at the same time. This forced me to realize that there is a lot of complexity in Halo that we as males are simply used to.

At the basic level, the game requires you to use two analog sticks and 10 buttons as if they were a mere extension of your body- a skill that took most of us many years to master, by starting with a simple NES/SNES controller and gradually moving up as new systems arrived.

On the next level, Halo requires knowledge of basic infantry combat: things like cover, fire discipline, where to aim your gun, which types of guns are good in certain situations, basic maneuvers like flanking, etc. etc. As with the controller, these are not things that you can intuitively know, they must be learned through practice.

And then there is the top level. Skills like aiming and how to move when under fire or knowledge of things like map layouts and blast radii of explosive weapons. Most of us have already mastered the the lower levels, and so it is only these challenges that we think about. But the female newcomer is likely to be overwhelmed by most or all of this complexity at once. Some persevere, but most will just go hang out with the douchebag playing sugary emotional songs on his guitar (at least he doesn't give them shit for not being able to instantly master complex tasks).

Perhaps there is a reason why simpler games, like Goldeneye for the N64, continue to be so popular; they are worlds easier to pick up and start playing, while still being very fun. I wonder if such a game could succeed in today's market, or if most non-gamers are just permanantly turned off to anything more complex than flash puzzle games.

Warhammer Online: A Partial Review

2008-10-21T06:00:00.001-06:00

Note: Right now, I'm intending this to be the first of a series, with a final post once I've spent some time at endgame, and perhaps one or two in between.

I've already written two articles on WAR, so for this review I'll try not to duplicate anything and stick to topics that I haven't covered.

First off, the good. WAR has done a solid job of delivering a fun, approachable, PvP-oriented game. The game is very easy to pick up; no tutorial or instruction manual is needed, you can learn all the essentials just by playing the first few levels. The combat pacing is very Guild Wars-esque: you will be doing things very rapidly, but the actual course of a fight will take a long time to unfold. The game manages to capture the slogging feel of a giant medieval battle even with only 20 total participants. In fact, the entire atmosphere is one of constant war. Zones have a soundtrack of cannon fire and the distant cries of battle, and from the second you enter the world, there are soldiers trying to fight off the enemy. The world feels dynamic and alive, and it sets aside moral complexities and uneasy truces- it's genocide or bust for the game's three racial pairings.

The classes are also pretty well done. Balance is still pretty rough (more on that later), but each class has some sort of unique mechanic that, while mirrored on the opposing faction, is quite different from any other class you will find on your side. My experience thus far has been mainly with three classes: The swordmaster, the archmage, and the disciple of khaine. I've already talked about the swordmaster's and the disciple's mechanics. The archmage delivers another interesting, albeit less gameplay-defining, mechanic: high magic. High magic is essentially a way to boost healing spells by casting damage spells, and vice-versa. In some cases, it can deliver a similar level of fun and satisfaction as soul essence and blade dancing, rewarding you for switching roles often. But frequently, it falls flat, and that brings me to the bad.

High magic is one example of the many "almost"s in WAR. On the surface, it seems like a great idea: buff damage through healing, so that healers aren't forced to healbot. But when the chips are down, it just isn't worth the time and AP investment to stop healing, no matter how powerful that nuke might get.

Another example is the open RvR. This is sold as being the meat of the game, but it is not nearly as active as you expect. Two factors contribute to this: lag and rewards. WAR's code is just not up to the task of having 50+ people involved in a keep siege, and even on top-of-the line machines, these battles can slow to a crawl. The result is that people rarely attack a defended keep in force, and most keep sieges I've done have involved a total of 10-20 people tops. Fun, perhaps, but hardly the epic battles we were sold. The rewards are also an issue; scenerios give much more reward per time invested. However, as more people realize that the gameplay itself is the reward, this issue should dissappear as gearheads go back to WoW or some other upgrade treadmil.

Class balance, while good enough for a launch game, is still not where it needs to be in the long term. Many mirrored versions of the same class are clearly superior to their counterparts, and within archetypes, there are a few classes that stand out as being much better overall. Also, the squig herder, magus, shadow warrior, and engineer, are noticeably weaker than all the others, and this has resulted in an almost nonexistent population of these classes. They aren't so horribly gimped that they can't be effective, but the power differences are still significant enough to be problematic.

The last big "almost" is the world itself. As I mentioned, it certainly feels dynamic, but so far it is actually quite static. Zones change control on a daily basis, and yet nothing else seems to change in the world. No new territory is gained, no new NPCs or the like appear, and there is not even some sort of recruiter asking players for their assistance in claiming another zone still in the grips of the enemy. I was really hoping for more, but perhaps the higher tiers will deliver.

Mythic is promising a solution (or at least progress on one) to these issues and many more, along with two of the four cut classes, with their 1.1 update. But there is one problem that no patch will be able to fix, and that is the community. Already, there is a noticeable population of whiners and other sorts of people that are impossible to satisfy. But game companies try to anyway, and the results of addressing their often dubious concerns or implementing their greedy desires can be disastrous, and even if they are ignored, they still create a pervasive negativeness that can drive away newcomers and current players alike.

At the time of writing, people's free months are starting to end. This is WAR's first test, but it could be a blessing in disguise if the whiners jump ship. And the next trial is just around the corner: Wrath of the Lich King drops November 13th. Age of Conan established that companies have 1-2 months tops to fix major problems in their games, and that's without an impending WoW expansion. While WAR was released in much better shape, it is still in dire need of polish. Hopefully Mythic can deliver, because I think there is a very solid game here, just waiting to be released from the bonds of "almost".

I Really Want to Love EVE Online

2008-10-16T12:00:00.000-06:00

Really, I do. It has all the makings of an MMO that I could meet at a party, have a few drinks with, then go elope to Vegas that same night and beat the odds to live Happily Ever After™: A cool sci-fi setting (I'm really sick of all the medieval themed MMOs...), a unique and awesome character advancement system, a top-notch community all living on the same server, and an endgame that is entirely player-driven. Plus, spaceships.

But somehow, developer CCP has managed to make the worst early/mid-game that I have ever experienced. Grinding the same 5 missions over and over for money to buy a bigger ship and faction to allow you to grind a new set of 5 missions for money to buy an even bigger ship and faction to... It's like they took the average but drinkable liquor that is WoW and distilled it down to raw gutrot.

To be fair, it is improving. My first attempt several years ago was abandoned after the terrible tutorial dropped me out in space without a clue. My more recent forray, aided by a vastly improved tutorial that placed me on solid footing, lasted about two months. Perhaps if I had stuck it out a few more, I might be happily involved with some aspect of the endgame. But then again, maybe that's just me making apologies that I shouldn't.

WAR Stories

2008-10-14T12:00:00.000-06:00

Since open beta, I've been playing this game on and off. Of course, arguably the damn thing is still in open beta, but that seems to be the way with PC games these days, especially MMOs. Despite the memory leaks and the general lack of polish however, the game has still provided the essential fun.

First off, as I said, I've been playing on and off. But unlike the other MMOs I've played (WoW, EVE, and AoC) WAR doesn't seem to mind that I may not log in for several days at a time, or that the game has been out for almost a month and I'm still only rank 19. No, it says, don't feel rushed. Take your time and enjoy the leveling process at whatever pace you desire. I have previously praised Guild Wars' leveling system as an ideal, but I think I am more impressed with WAR's. It doesn't just hide a grind to cap behind something more fun than killing boars, it makes every level of play worthwhile and enjoyable in its own right. The game could end at my current rank, and I'd still hand EA my money each month.

As for the raw gameplay, I've already had some cool experiences. Playing as a swordmaster, the high elf tank, I've really had to work at learning a new way of playing. Tanks can actually protect their allies in WAR, with abilities that reduce enemy damage output, increase allied avoidance, and split damage. But you aren't just a pet rottweiler for the clothies, you also carry some nice front-line abilities like knockbacks, spell interrupts, and just generally being a pain in the ass that won't die. You have to decide whether to hang back and protect your backline or get up front and lead the charge, whether you should grab a flag or if another player would hold it better with you guarding them.

Then there is the swordmaster's class mechanic, blade dancing. Like the Guild Wars assassin, the bulk of your attacks are chained together into a three-part combo, with moves restricted to one stage of the chain. But as compensation for only being able to use 2/3rds of your attacks at a given time (the starter moves are always available), the final move in the chain has no cost, in addition to being the most potent. Throw all this together, and you have a class that takes some serious finesse to play well, and rewards that finesse with allies that stay alive. It is very satisfying when you link up your dance just right, so that you are always in the proper stage at just the right time to use the move you need to get the effect you want.

Plus, pushing the limits of how long you can survive guarding a flag solo, just as "Don't Stop Believing" comes out of nowhere on Pandora is pretty kickass.

Help, I'm Trapped in Dawn of War!

2008-10-01T12:00:00.001-06:00

I've never really been one for RTSs. I'm the guy that sets the difficulty on easy, builds up a massive army of one really cool unit, then wipes out the helpless CPU. I just don't have the micromanagement chops to really do well with the genre, and no title save the legendary Starcraft has held my attention for more than a month.

But I cannot stop playing Dawn of War to save my wretched life. Ever since it first hit shelves, I've been returning to the 41st century intermitantly, like some sort of junkie who can't quite kick his habit. I can't help it. I want to stay clean, but it seems everywhere I turn, Relic is pushing a new expansion pack, with a new campaign or new race that is worth the relapse.

Part of it is the setting. The Warhammer 40k universe is my favorite alternate universe ever created, combining high technology with the arcane in a galactic dystopia. But mostly, the game just has a kickass atmosphere. I can think of no other RTS where combat is so visceral, a veritable orgy of blood and bolter rounds, with squads shouting battle cries and elite units tossing weaker ones halfway across the screen.

I think if an MMOFPS were to combine the 40k IP with the same feel of Relic's opus, I would very likely waste away in my computer chair from gaming bliss-induced malnutrition. I can think of few better ways to go.

Should We Miss 200 Hour Long RPGs?

2008-09-29T12:00:00.000-06:00

If you ask any gamer over ~20 years old, chances are that one of their top games of all time is the Baldur's Gate series. The Bioware/Black Isle classic is known for its quality story that spanned an epic amount of gameplay time. Massive dungeons were crawled, dragons slain, castles liberated, and dark secrets uncovered. In particular, the copious sidequests available in chapter 2 of the second installment could easily drag the game out into months of marathon play sessions.

Sometimes, I miss getting that kind of value for my gaming dollar. I'm lucky to get 30-40 hours out of a modern RPG (maybe twice that if it has decent replay value).

This isn't to say that the modern RPG has somehow devolved. In exchange for shorter games, we've recieved vastly improved graphics, volumes more dialogue (and the associated character development), fights that aren't solved with "send in summoned creatures to burn up the enemy's good spells", and fully 3-D worlds that are much more interesting to explore. I certainly don't regret the money and time I spent on KotOR, NWN2, or Mass Effect.

But still, sometimes I'd be willing to ditch some of that for a middle ground of sorts: a good 70-80 hours with the same characters, in a deeper, more involved storyline.

Making Some Changes...

2008-09-28T13:20:00.002-06:00

Reading over my earlier posts, I'm noticing two things. 1, they're kinda long and rambling. 2, the proofreading is pretty poor. From now on, I'm going to try and focus on making shorter postings with prose worth reading. I can't promise an end to long, self-indulgent rants, but I'll at least try to limit them to the occasional topic worthy of such a word count and make sure that the writing is on a level that makes them tolerable to read.

Why Most DRM Sucks, and How Valve Got Steam Right (sort of)

2008-09-20T12:00:00.001-06:00

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management if you don't know what I'm talking about). Gaming DRM has been in the news with the release of Spore and its draconian 3 install limit. But it has been around for as long as you've had to have a CD in the drive to play a game, even though you did the full install.

I'm not going to get into whether DRM is morally right or wrong. The fact is it's here, most likely to stay.

So why exactly does most of it suck? Because the better it is at stopping unauthorized copying, the more it encourages piracy. This may seem counterintuitive, but consider that a cracked version of the game won't require a CD in the drive. It won't require you to authenticate it online, or call to beg customer support if you've already installed it several times. The cracked game won't require other software to run in the background. It won't suddenly stop working if some piece of software decides it doesn't like another installed program. And so on. DRM asks you to pay for a product that is inferior to the cracked, free version.

So to make DRM not suck, it has to somehow be part of a scheme that adds value instead of subtracting it. This is why Valve got steam right. Steam, despite some early growing pains, is a very cool platform. It creates a centralized community for playing a ton of different games. It allows you to buy games from the comfort of your own home (and often at a lower price than a boxed copy) then have them delivered as fast as your connection can handle it. No more rifling through massive collections of optical disks searching for the game you want to play, it's right there in the internets! No more crawling through poorly designed official websites for patches, steam will update games for you. No more CD keys to get lost!

In short, steam adds value and convenience, which is enough (imo) to make the steam version of a game worth the price premium over the cracked version.

This isn't to say that steam is without problems, however. Chief among these is that you do not actually own a steam game. Your "rights" to play it are contingent on Valve's servers being online, which is not a guarantee. You also cannot sell a steam game once you're done playing it.

The other issue is that other companies can still include their own DRM on top of steam. I was initially thrilled to find that bioshock was available through steam: here was a way to enjoy a great game without putting up with the draconian DRM included with the retail version of the game. Unfortunately, the securom shit still came with the steam version.

However, despite these problems, steam still serves as a great model for how a DRM scheme can be implemented without pissing off customers.

UPDATE (9/28/08): Holy shit, I really should refrain from writing posts late at night at the end of a sleep-deprived week. The horrible abortion of a second sentence from the third paragraph has been put out of its misery.

The Halo Effect

2008-09-18T14:02:00.002-06:00

It's been almost 7 years since Halo: Combat Evolved first hit the xboxen of millions of gamers everywhere. What resulted was nothing short of a revolution. A sensible control scheme based around analog sticks, while still not as good as the venerable mouse and keyboard, finally allowed the shooter to make the leap to consoles with a minimum of frustration. Oh yeah, and there was a pretty fun game there as well.

Two sequels later, it isn't much of a stretch to say that Halo has revolutionized the entire shooter genre. Things like stories and characters are no longer luxuries. Having HP as a simple static number, replenished by medipacks is on the way out, replaced by damage that can gradually heal itself if you spend some time out of the line of fire. Being able to carry 10 guns with you is even farther out the door. Having some sort of melee is practically mandatory. Vehicles should be easy to operate, and integrate seamlessly into the gameplay. Realism, especially physics, is important. But it can be subverted for the sake of fun (People flying 30 feet back when you kill them with a melee attack isn't realistic, but as a Bungie designer points out, it is awesome).

While Halo didn't invent most of this, it was the first game to bring it all to the masses in a single package, and the folks and Bungie deserve a good deal of credit becauase of it.

Unfortunately, much to my annoyance, some of the less savory aspects of Halo gameplay have also made their way throughout the industry.

Explosives as close-range weapons. I just love being gibbed by a rocket launcher, while its user 15 feet away escapes with a minor heat rash. Back in my day, rocket launchers were medium-range weapons that existed mainly as a counter to vehicles and a way to punish the other team for grouping up, not as a viable replacement for shotguns in a pinch. And don't get me started on grenades. Grenades should exist to soften up an area before assaulting it or to attack people behind cover. In Halo, spamming grenades is a mainstay of all forms of combat.

You can see this effect especially in CoD4, where grenade launchers and RPGs are banned on many servers because of the enormous power they have. Fortunately, frag grenades are limited to 1 per person (3 with perks) and cannot be picked up from the game world, else grenade spamming would be a huge problem.

The knife-fight shotgun. If you've ever fired a real shotgun, you know that they wield considerable killing power out over 150 feet or more (each pellet in a standard 00 shell packs the punch of a small pistol round, and you get 9 of them per shell) . If the things were only potent within 5 feet of your target, you would have seen the concept abandoned shortly after the first prototype. In the same vein, a shotgun shot shouldn't be several times more powerful than a burst from an assault rifle at short range. The use of shotguns as close-range weapons is because of the ease of hitting your target as compared to other weapons, not because they can kill a genetically-enhanced super-soldier wearing heavy metal armor and an energy shield in one shot.

This has shown up in virtually every FPS with shotguns that I've played since Halo was released, with the exception of counter-strike, turning what was one of my favorite classes of weapon into something I don't bother with very much.

Fists/knives/Gun butts > Bullets. This is probably my #1 most annoying Halo effect. I can almost buy this in the case of Master Chief, or a similar sci-fi badass. 700 pounds of body/armor weight behind a metal fist or gun butt will fuck up pretty much anything. But when my SAS soldier in CoD4 does more damage with a quick slash from his combat knife than with a blast from a .50 sniper rifle, something is horribly, horribly wrong. There's a good reason combat has transitioned from swords and spears to guns: Bullets hurt a lot more, and range is a massive advantage. Even Gordon Freeman replaced his trusty crowbar with a gun as soon as he could. Melee insta-kills should be limited to well-placed throat slashes against unaware opponents. i.e. they should be really hard to execute, and not worth the effort unless you need stealth or are going for style.

This is even worse, because in multiplayer, melee like this tends to favor people with the best connections. You only get one shot, so if your opponent has positioning a few milliseconds more up to date, and can release his attack a few milliseconds earlier, it translates into a significant advantage.

The exception to this rule is dedicated super melee weapons like the Halo sword. A 1-hit kill from a purely melee weapon that requires the user to close distance (or risk missing by using the charge from a longer range) and carefully line up his swing is perfectly acceptable because there is actually a drawback involved. But when it is possible to freely shoot and then instantly deliver a lethal blow, I get annoyed.

The giant targeting reticle. This is a close #2. If you want a weapon to be inaccurate, then use a blooming reticle. Thankfully this is gradually getting fixed as the series ages, but the original assault rifle was nigh-unusable at medium to long ranges because of the damn reticle.

Mass Effect, while not strictly an FPS, is the most egregious offender in this category, as it incorporates blooming giant reticles, making most guns damn near impossible to aim at long ranges until your character is a really high level.

Semi-automatic sniper rifles with minimal recoil. There's a reason the autosnipers are almost universally banned in CS: They are horribly overpowered. The only real way to balance a weapon that has high killing power, very high accuracy, and extreme range is to give it a slow rate of fire, either by making it bolt-action, or giving it insane recoil. And no, the trails from the Halo sniper rifle are not adequate, since there's a small chance that you yourself will have a sniper rifle to return fire.

It is true that a RL sniper is very effective at devastating entire squads from long range, forcing borderline suicidal tactics to deal with him. But this is one of those cases where realism needs to be subverted for the sake of fun.

This isn't to say that Halo is a bad game. Despite the annoying aspects, I still love gathering around the xbox and playing a few hours with my buddies. But it would be nice if designers tried to improve the Halo model when they implement it, instead of just copying it.

WAR Open Beta Impressions

2008-09-13T22:25:00.000-06:00

So I've been playing in the WAR "open" beta for the last week. Here are my impressions thus far:

PvE: This is a big "meh", with the exception of PQs. All the normal quests are of the same "kill x of y" that you've done 400 million times in every other MMO. The greenskin quests have a cool flavor (one of the early ones involves shooting yourself out of a catapult" but once the humor and the uncontrollable urge to shout "WAAAAGH!!" all the time wears off, they're pretty much the same as well. I honestly haven't done a normal quest in 5 or 6 levels.

Dungeons also seem like an afterthought. My character is level 12 (out of 40). By this point in WoW I would have had the opportunity to do several dungeons; in WAR I haven't even seen one. I've heard in previews that there are, in fact, dungeons to be crawled, but that they're all limited to a single 6-man party. Unless Mythic can do considerably better than blizzard at creating small dungeons (not likely, but who knows), I think what dungeons there are will be run a few times and then forgotten.

PQs, on the other hand, are a cool new addition. My experience is that you will either love them or hate them. Personally, I have a good time doing them. They're second only to Guild Wars missions in terms of enjoyable low-level PvE. Plus, even if you're like me and get fucked on loot rolls (I almost always get a gold contribution, but only win a loot bag about 1/4-1/3rd of the time) you still accrue influence, which you can trade in for some decent rewards. Plus, the need for tanks and healers means that those classes have a venue for PvE leveling where they won't be gimped.

On a related note, Open groups are an elegant solution to the LFG problem. No more spamming LFG/LFM in chat, just open the window and join an open party that's doing what you want to be doing. While I doubt it will work well in dungeons, for open RvR and PQs it works great. In WAR, I rarely have to fight alone thanks to open groups.

Also, crafting. I almost forgot to mention crafting, because right now it is pretty much lol. There may be a point to it, but I don't really give a flying fuck. I think there's a profession that works kind of like jewlcrafting/enchanting in WoW, but that's as much as I've cared to find out.

Overall, if you really like PvE, save your money. With the exception of PQs, there's nothing you can find here that isn't done way better by at least one other game.

PvP: This is really the meat of the game, and so far I am pretty impressed. WAR's zones are designed with RvR combat in mind. Every zone has a central RvR area with objectives to capture and no PvE type stuff to get in the way. Its like old school BRM, only in every zone. The only real downside is that things tend to get zergy in these zones.

Scenarios are, of course, the WAR equivalent to WoW's BGs. Except that there are a lot more of them. Already I've played in 6, and I still have two more tiers of content to go. Mythic goes with more of an FPS philosophy, where every map has similar mechanics but a vastly different layout. The philosophy seems geared more towards simply providing even teams and objectives for them to fight over as opposed to trying to make a bunch of unique minigames. Which approach holds up in the long run has yet to be seen, but I really enjoy the variety of maps present.

If you like the hypercompetitive world of WoW arenas, this is also not your game. WAR's focus is on RvR, to the point where you can't even duel players from your own realm. There are no controlled small-scale deathmatches, everything is at least 10 to a side and objective based.

But if you enjoyed old school world PvP and BGs, WAR will be exactly what you're looking for. As I said, the nature of mythic's zone design ensures that there's always some open-world PvP happening, and that it will be easy to find. While it does tend to get a bit too TM/SS-zerg-ish for my tastes, there's always the option to fly around until you find a zone with the level of activity you're looking for.

Keep sieges are also pretty cool. I finally had the chance to participate in a siege the other day (destruction usually controls all the t2 keeps on my server, and order rarely tries to take them), and I must say that despite the lag (which was actually not too bad considering my ancient PC), I had a lot of fun. The whole process is pretty intense, with siege weapons randomly gibbing you, casters swapping spells from atop the walls, and healers frantically trying to keep the melee on the ram up through a deluge of boiling oil. Then when you break in, there's some champion NPCs and a keep lord to kill (along with a horde of defending players, of course!). With the lord slain, you gain control of the keep and there's a PQ-type loot roll. I ended up getting the top slot and some nice rare boots. Karma making for my shitty PQ luck!

Mythic also has a system in place that makes doing scenarios or open RvR a worthwhile endeavor for lowbies. Basically, whenever you're in an RvR zone, your stats will be scaled up to approximate a level 8, 18, 28, or 38 character. You aren't as strong, but you can still make a solid contribution.

You can also level through PvP, which has been my method. Its nice to be able to do what you want, instead of having to do things you don't want before you can do what you want. Mythic has done a lot of effort in ensuring lowbie RvR is a good option. XP and gold gain is at a decent rate, and there is a ton of gear that you can buy as you level up. And while the item art in general pales in comparison to vanilla WoW/WotLK, having matching gear at low levels is a big plus.

Mechanics: The combat system is on par with Guild Wars. It is very simple and easy to pick up, but it has a ton of strategic depth. Action points regen at a rate low enough that you can't spam AP moves non-stop, but high enough that with smart playing, you always have enough to do what you need to.

My class, the Disciple of Khaine, also has a secondary resource pool of "soul essence", which is built up by anything that costs AP, and is used to power your heals. Also, your best heal is actually a melee attack that does some damage and heals for 250% of the damage caused, and two of your AP-based melee attacks are also weak heals themselves, so there is enough overlap that you aren't totally fucked if you run dry on one resource. But careful management will yield much better results.

Collision detection is also a welcome mechanic. Being able to generate peels or stop advances just by body-blocking opens up a lot of interesting choices in combat: Do I charge in with the tanks and other melee, keeping them up and adding my physical presence to our push, or do I hang back and lineback for the casters, keeping opposing melee under control and healing up clothies that are getting pounded, letting more tanks stay up front?

Balance: I can't really say much about this, because the game hasn't been played for nearly long enough. However, mythic's almost total non-focus on PvE may give them the freedom they need to hone PvP balance to a fine edge. Even if things stay unbalanced though, the focus on large groups should give the win to whichever side is better organized.

Conclusion: WAR is a niche game. A large niche, perhaps, but it still doesn't have the kind of broad-based appeal that WoW does.

If you wax nostalgic about the old days of TM/SS, BRM, and organized guild WSG groups duking it out for nothing more than bragging rights, WAR may very well be the game for you. If you like a more competitive esport-like PvP, or PvE in general, WoW will still be the champ.

Overall, I expect WAR to do well, and it will certainly push blizzard to improve areas of WoW that are sorely lacking. I will 100% be playing at release, and I expect quite a few old-school WoW PvPers burnt out by arenas will too.

Photo Credit!

2008-09-12T16:20:00.002-06:00

If somebody could tell me who created my profile photo, I'd like to know so I can give them credit (or take it down if they want to be an asshole). I don't believe in plagiarism, but it was just too kickass not to use.