Category: Games

Anything having to do with games (Computer & Tabletop)

Quote of the Day: Opportunity Costs

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Biowar

Quoth powernut

Companies will shut down profitable branches simply because they aren’t as profitable as they were pitched to management, or as profitable as the competition. From a capitalist economic theory standpoint, they can argue that they are losing “opportunity cost”, but the difference between opportunity cost and reality is the difference between a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and a doubloon in your pocket. When leprechauns are your financial advisors, you’ve got problems.

In related news, it seems that the TORtanic is continuing its steady sinking. They try to pass off the downsizing as business as usual, but they forget that the internetubes have a long memory and we remember when they said:

Unlike a lot of other game companies that, once they launch a game, downsize their teams radically, our plan is to keep the team together and continue to focus on building content.

Uh-huh

They should have made KOTOR3 with co-op instead. I would have bought that.

I now wonder if Bioware will eventually suffer the same fate as many of the other companies that EA bought. To paraphrase:

The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Game companies rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished. Bioware is not the first. By utilizing our funding, game companies develop along the paths we desire. They exist because we allow it, and will end because we demand it.

The eventual fate of Bioware?

Epic 5-hour Dune CCG game on OCTGN.

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So I spent 5 hours yesterday having an epic session in the Dune CCG on OCTGN. I was playing with two old timers of the game, JP and flaney and the game took far more than any of us expected, primarily because of the kind of decks everyone was playing.  Namely all of us where in some way focused in battle so there was a lot of pitched encounters.

I haven’t mentioned yet my work on Dune CCG and I’ve done with Doomtown and 7th Sea, but I plan to do that in the future. Suffice to say that Dune is a very deep game on a strategic level and it really supports backstabbing, scheming and careful plotting, as befits the universe of Dune. Thus the game we played yesterday.

There were 3 minor houses duking it out to see which would ascend to the high council. I was backed by the Water Sellers, JP was backed by House Corrino and flaney was backed by the Dune Smugglers with a heavy Corrino support.

Things started out fairly quickly, with JP managing to secure access to Imperial Revenues on the first turn which provided significant funding throughout the game given the amount of battles ongoing. Then on the same turn secured Carthag along with a Carthag privateer who became an instant cash cow. I was able to grab Arrakeen instead and was lucky to get a Patriarch to go with it, setting me up for the same combo that JP did, but for less money. I eventually also managed to bring in some heave defense against battles in the form of my House Shield Generator, which I foolishly hoped would make my homeworld impervious to assault. Flaney on the other hand started out slower, opting out to bring in Corrino firepower first and realizing that he’s messed his deck construction quite a bit 🙂

How the game looked like on turn 3 or so

My deck was trying to set-up command based combos. Specifically using cards which increase my persona’s command and having personas or other cards which are based on such command rank. Thus I had one Persona stealing solaris (The currency of the game) from other players equal to his command, another giving me favour the same way, and yet another who I engaged (i.e. turned sideways to mark as “used”) to get Solaris equal to his command. My hand was fairly nice to me in this way, so I ended up with a nice money-making machine that started making the two other players very nervous. So much so that by the 3rd turn, they were already scheming to take me down.

Fortunately, I had forecasted and brought a lot of battle defenses out to stave off such problems. Unfortunately, against 2 players it’s almost impossible to hold out. I was at least secure in my thoughts that my primary money maker, my own homeworld, would be secure by being backed by a house shield generator. Unfortunately disaster struck (certainly brought about by the cunning Corrino spies)

Noooo! My wonderful Shield!

Cackling with evil excitement, JP on the bottom started his offensive on the peaceful Water Sellers. I had quite a lot of defense to handle one attacker, but seeing as both other players were already planning as a team to take me down, I didn’t hold much hope.

The Sardaukar Assault begins. Already Arrakeen has fallen.

Flaney’s Smuggler backed house followed suit, no doubt while being covertly financed by the Emperor, given that Sardaukar commanders could be seen leading their troops. Under their combined assault, even my homeworld protected by a Palace Fortress was eventually pillaged.

The Norther Pollar Sink falls

Being thoroughly subdued, I was hoping to get a breath of air, but unfortunately that was not to be. The assault continued relentless into the next round after I managed to recover Arrakeen and my Homeworld by performing an honest trade in water selling (to JP specifically). Honestly could not understand why I was being focused on so heavily, even though I was completely peaceful. After another round of Sardaukar raids, I was left once again completely subdued.

Further to my aggravation, the other player’s colluding went much further than simply ganging up on the honest merchants. Flaney was letting JP petition the imperial assembly for resources and major house allies, without the slightest of resistance. JP was getting everything dirt cheap! At this point I must admit that I started being a bit annoyed as it seemed to me that I was truly playing a 2v1 game. The only thing they weren’t doing was giving money to each other! It started looking as if all that mattered was that just that I wouldn’t win, no matter what, which is a bit unfair to tell the truth.

Unfortunately after the second round of assault, JP petitioned for Arrakeen (which he got for bargain price of course) and locked me out completely out of my money making scheme. That achieved, both players were ready to start working on their victory rather than just beating up on me, until I managed to sneak past JP’s defenses and reclaim Arrakeen by sending out my Marshal and his Laser-bearing Guard Commander flunky to restore order. This was primarily because due to a mistake, JP has forgotten to restore his House Agent, which then allowed me to poison his defending Guard.

Arrakeen then allowed me to quickly spawn 21 Solaris from it, which were primarily went to recovering from the last assault. And yet, both other players were outraged at how Solaris much my perfectly honest trading was producing, and were determined to destroy the growing free market of Arrakis. As soon as their turn came about, Saurdaukar legions once more descended and razed my Arrakeen headquarters to the round, followed by yet another Smuggler assault on my homeworld. This time I wasn’t going to recover that easily.

It was obvious that the Corrino player was working towards gaining admission to the high council by sheer force, as they quickly accumulated control of all the major deserts on Dune and both cities. Only the Dune seat of Governorship still remained in my hands. I was urgently pressing Flaney to reconsider his alliance with JP who was one single battle away from winning the game. All JP had to do, was pry the Dune Regency out of my cold dead fingers. JP knew that as well, so the first order of business after grabbing Arrakeen, was to turn on his ally.

Smuggler homeworld goes down. They retaliate on Corrino outposts and deserts

Hostilities quickly escalated to full-blown war, but I doubted Flaney could halt the progress of the Corrino who were by now making obscene amounts of money (In one turn one he brought in something like 3 Saurdaukar battalions and 2 commanders) and had significant defenses set up to prevent all assault.

At this point were going on for 4 hours of game or so. This was primarily because the other players were not so familiar with the OCTGN engine, so figuring out how to do some things, along with the general thought required from the game was taking its toll. We had all far exceeded our alloted time. I had to go to bed, Flaney had to go to work and JP had to do something as well, don’t remember what 🙂 We were all eager to see the game finished, regardless of how awesome it was, but it felt like it would go on forever.

I'm back in the fight!

Fortunately for me, JP did a fatal mistake. After the Smuggler assaults, he completely forgot to reclaim control of Carthag. I assumed because he didn’t want to destroyed again, but he told me later that it slipped his mind. So on my turn I petitioned its governorship from the Imperial Assembly after making sure that I couldn’t be opposed financially (see: Selling others some more water). This allowed me another bout of money-making, which was lower than with Arrakeen, but still significant. This in turn allowed me to recover to a large extend and start aggressively collecting spice for my admission to the high council.

Given that I sneaked this by after the Corrino player had finished, I was not in fear of being run over by the Saurdaukar again for a while, and the smugglers just didn’t have the firepower to get through my defenses. So I quickly purchased the Imperial Favor to get the initiative next turn, and with my newly controlled deserts I produced and bought the spice I needed to win before the others could mount an effective offense.

The Water Sellers achieve admission to the high council.

Through the rubble I managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Rising through my burnt cities like a water phoenix. Free Trade thriumphant!

All jokes aside, there were certainly a few combos I abused in my deck to make obscene amounts of money but it wasn’t as overpowered as it seemed. There was a lot of investment in my personas and they all took multiple turns to recover the money I spent on them. The Corrino were making use of the same combos, albeit not so refined, and having similar money production each turn, which is why on the last turn they had something like 70 Solaris worth or cards on the table. They will undoubtedly say that even after all the beating I got, I still won, which is a testament to how overpowered my cards were, but I’ll say that to my defense they had decks that played to my strengths and I only won because of 2 key mistakes on their part.

The game ended at around the 5-hour mark, which was already stretching it. It was however such a great and thoughtful experience that we couldn’t just abandon it. You should have seen how the other 2 players were cheering each other on as they figured out a way to break through my defenses and raze everything to the ground, and then do it again each turn >_<

In the end, I only won because of 2 crucial mistakes done by the others due to tiredness. If I hadn’t secured Carthag on the last turn, there was no way I was going to be able to make enough money to recover my defenses and buy favour and spice on top of that. On the other hand, player mistakes were the only thing going for me in that game, given just how brutally I had been put in the corner and beat upon.

In the end, my victory was just as well, since JP was about to concede due to time constraints, and so was I and Flaney, so maybe they (subconsciously) let me win, who knows? I’ll take my victories where I can get them, and after being the punching-bag in such a heated game, I think I deserved it. 🙂

Guild Wars 2: First Impressions

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My personal impressions after the pre-purchase open beta. This game definitelly lives up to the Hype.

So, this past weekend was the first pre-order beta and after playing until the wee hours of the day, I think it’s only appropriate that I make a post about it and bore you all with my personal impressions 🙂

So, first things first: The game is everything it advertised and that is saying a lot. Most of the time, a heavily expected game just doesn’t match its hype to any extent, but Guild Wars 2 (GW2 from now on) matches it easily. I will not declare it a complete success just yet, because I’ve only seen the first 10 levels of content or so (with three different race/class combinations) and it could very well still pull an “Age of Conan” and quickly lose steam after level 25 or so, and turn into a grindfest to cover it up.

However, there’s a few things that work in GW2’s favour in this regard, and it has to do with some of the fundamental designs of the game. I’ll go through that in the next sections. For now, I  want to talk about the hyped things I knew about and how they turned out.

(I won’t go into details on some of the things I’ll talk about, as you’ll find multiple sources explaining them in far more depth than I could. I will provide links when possible though.)

Dynamic Events

This is one of the things I was the most excited about, and after playing a considerable amount of time with them, I must say that I love them. The idea that you find things to do in the world as you explore is almost alien to all other MMORPGs out there at the moment. After playing Star Gars: The Old Republic beta a few months ago, where it would almost cynically bundle all quest givers for your particular level in a “hub” (i.e. a small safe area with merchants and so on) which you’d have to finish before moving on, this was a serious breath of fresh air. I honestly do not like the hub approach as it feels just so forced.

With dynamic events, I could just go exploring in the generic area of an appropriate level and I would find exciting things to do. And we’re talking about exciting, not silly “kill 10 rats” quests. For example, one of the last ones I played, which I found randomly when I went harvesting (i.e. I was just exploring, looking for crafting materials, and bumped into this dynamic event). It went like this:

I discovered a small outpost in the wild, which was being attacked by some things called “crawlers” I believe. I started defending the area with another player and after losing ground at the start, a few others came around and we managed to drive them off. Soon after that, everyone left to go do their own things, and I was hanging around a bit selling some junk and buying some other stuff. Once I was done, every other player that had helped me was gone. I was alone.

I noticed a quest giver (Note: There are a few “quest givers” around, but they are not as you’d expect. They are also fairly rare) so  I decided to talk to him. He was a scholar who wanted to research some relic or something (was 3am, wasn’t paying too much attention). I accepted the quest and we started an escort mission. I needed to get him to a location for him to study something and protect him from dangers. The dangers were some Ice Wyrms popping up from the frozen lake we walked upon, and some still rampaging crawlers.

Once I accepted the quest, a Dynamic Event started about it. Which means anyone approaching my area would notice it, and get a marker on their map. I started escorting alone, but soon, another player joined and (this is fairly stunning in it’s brilliant simplicity), started helping out. Think of this for a moment: In any other MMORPG this would be fairly impossible. Either you’d have to start the quest while in a party already, or you’d have to specifically invite another player to help, by sharing the quest, which would take a lot of communicating effort and…well it’s a mess which is why it’s not done that much.

So I was escorting this dude, killing out wyrms and crawlers and by the time we reached the end, there were 3 of us. The event finishes, I get some small reward. Now another event starts. We need to destroy the corrupted relic he found there. As we start doing it, we start getting swarmed by Wyrms, as well as a few solo enemies defending it. Some of us are attacking the relic, some are defending them and so on, all is well. And then a swarm of defending raiders run outside a nearby cave and start kicking out asses. We fall back and desperately try to hold them off. Then a group of like 5 new players descents from a hill to help out. Quickly the battle turns and we drive them back. Soon, the relic is destroyed and the event finishes. Soon another event starts. A hostile shaman approaches to recreate the corruption, so we have to prevent him. Now the event really bumps up the difficulty. By now there were like 10-15 of us and I think there was a a partial wipe by all the enemies swarming in. I respawn and run back to the battle, by now there’s some portals with summoned enemies opened (another event) which is what caused us to lose the previous battle. So we all concentrate on destroying those first. We finish this event and run to the relic location to stop the Shaman. There is now something like 20 players and the Shaman event has become a Boss Fight. Special AoE attacks falling from the sky, enemies spawning in and a “bullet-sponge” shaman that needed the combined might of 20 players to bring down. In the end, we manage to get him down and the event is also finished. The area is now calm.

This, for me was an amazing experience. From a single-player escort quest, it became a 5 player destruction quest, then a 10 player survival quest, then 15 player destruction raid and finally a 25 player boss fight. By this time, it was like 4am, but at no point could I extricate myself from it, because I couldn’t just abandon the other players. And take note that this wasn’t just people fighting. There were some dropping down support AoEs, some running around reviving people, some trying to tank the enemies and so on. The naturally emerging teamwork was glorious! And at the end, everyone got rewarded, depending on how much they participated. I got the most reward because I was there from the very first escort mission (so basically I got a reward for each finished event in the “chain”) while others got only the rewards for each event they participated in.

This is the definitely the best way to do quest in MMORPGs. It just works so well and naturally. It really puts the MMO back into the RPG.

Renown Hearts

These worked similarly to dynamic events with two main differences: The progress for each heart is specific to your character and there’s many ways to fill the completion bar. This means that any player there can do the quest on their own pace and at their own preference. Most of them allow you to complete them without any combat. In fact, there are many that don’t involve any combat at all. Unfortunately it means that there’s not a lot of cooperation, even though many of them have ways to complete that involve helping others but it’s a minor points because the main purpose of Renown Hears from what I understood is different.

They are there to serve as beacons to focus players in a specific area (each heart is marked for its level, and players can easily participate in areas that are up to 1-2 levels higher than them with some skill) so what happens is that player will travel towards the heart (if they don’t like aimless exploring that is) and in the way find various dynamic events to take part. Then, the renown heart will hold them interested in the area for a bit,  long enough for various dynamic events to start, which puts you into an event chain, thereby hooking you. Fairly brilliant.

I also loved that many of them are a nice break from combat. Some of them are their own mini games, like the one where I had to find and bring bunny food to a guy, while dodging leaping bunnies all the way. Other players could help by scaring the bunnies away from others players. Another one I had to play snowball fights with kids or fight off enraged guards who turned into bears! Another was turning into a snow leopard and hunting giant chickens and bunnies in the bushes. Yet another was answering riddles! I loved the fact that if you wanted a break from combat, you got it quite often and if you didn’t like the mini games, there was almost something else to do in the area, or a way to complete it via combat.

Sidekicking

What happens when you want to play with your friends but realize that their character is 5 levels ahead of you? Either both of you make an alt and promise not to play them without the other, or you suck it up and quickly grind your way to their level, losing a lot of the story in the meantime, so that you can play the same content.

I started playing GW2 with a friend at some point, where we both made the same character, so that we can start in the same area. At some point I was having a break and he was trying a different class. Then I came back and he went into a break so I started trying our a new character class myself. When he came back, neither of us wanted to really play the characters we started together, but rather our current ones. But there was a problem. He was level 9 and I was level 4.

Hah, I’m joking, there was no problem whatsoever. All he needed to do was grab a portal to my own area and then we could continue question together seamlessly, as he was automatically adjusted downwards in level, so that he was always just 1 level above the current area’s recommendation. This means that the enemies were a bit easier for them, but nowhere near a walk in the park.

This works brilliantly because the game is not based on quests, but rather dynamic events. So there’s no way you’ll have done a particular quest and not able to do it again. You can always take part in dynamic events happening around you, which means that you will always be able to play with your friends. We played the last day with those 2 characters. The level different was a complete non-issue. How cool is that?

Combat

Combat in the world of GW2 is visceral and skill-based. You have your first 5 skills that you quickly get by simply using a weapon of choice and then as you level up, you slowly grab your race and class skills which where the real customization happen.

Initially, I thought that the dodge ability would be a gimmick, something that you use once or twice for not much effect. But now that I’ve played some other characters I realize that there’s a lot of other skills that allow you to perform extra blocks and evasions, and they’re all skill/timing based. When I used my engineer with shield and pistol, I had a block & stun skill, that I had to press at just the right time. With my Sword&Dagger wielding ranger, I had 3 different evasion skills to call upon. This means that for the lightly armored ranger it became imperative to learn when and how to dodge my enemies, because even same-level enemies hit hard. Melee with more than 2 enemies was always a very risky proposition and most often than not, I couldn’t handle it.

Unfortunately, the way the combat works now, coupled with the low skill of most players, means that melee combat is avoided by most, even though it has more damage potential (it hits faster/harder and it seems that all attacks his everyone in front of you). Basically if you went into the melee pile or toe-to-toe with a boss, you almost always fell on the grown in no time flat. The boss can wipe you with one hit, and the bundled mobs just focus fire you. With 1-3 players in an event, it’s still manageable, but when there’s 20 players and all the mobs are granted double the highest player level in order to last, then it’s a nightmare. As such, AoE skills and Ranged attacks rule the day. Even warriors play with guns and bows.

I think the main reason for this is three-fold. One, as I said is the low skill of most people playing currently, which made combat seem much more difficult, since you cannot dodge well (especially with the crazy lag we had).

The second reason is that because of all the newbies, all the starting areas were swamped. Which meant that any event had something like 20-30 people going at it, which not only is a clusterfuck by definition, not only does it boost the mobs so much that they’re mini-bosses into themselves, but it grinds most computers to a snail’s pace due to performance hit and lag. At a big battle around a lake,with something like 30-40 people fighting, I was having 14 FPS with the PC I built less than a year ago.

I don’t know if there’s any plans to address this, but I think one way to somehow about this is to make new enemies spread out a bit more. Right now they’re all pretty much in the same pile, which makes AoE effect and ranged attacks the best way to fight them. If the enemies instead spread out so that each attacks only one player if possible and gives preference to players that are not close to allies (i.e. so as to avoid creating a pile, by the enemies charging a group of players standing together) while ranged attackers focused on those not engaged in melee, then it would achieve the following:

1. Nobody would be safe. You couldn’t just stand on the back and fire arrows and AoEs into the clusterfuck. You would be sniped by archers or charged by melee enemies.

2. AoE wouldn’t be that effective, as there would be less of a mob in one spot. It would make achieving results with an AoE more about positioning yourself and hitting charging enemies or clusters or archers, rather than a mindless “fire into the clusterfuck” action.

3. Melee would not be suicidal. Since you’d be fighting 1 or two at most, you’d be able to actually utilize your evades and blocks and wouldn’t die in 3 seconds.

Hmm, I should probably suggest this somewhere (But where? The forums?)

On a sidenote: This is just my impressions for PvE, especially on large scale dynamic events. I’m guessing that combat in a PvP scenario would be something entirely different, as players would definitely focus fire players and go after the squishy ones first.

Story

The story is the one thing that didn’t really grab me. Although some of the quests in the story are interesting – such as transforming into a minotaur to trick some raiders, or masquerading into a bandit and then infiltrating their camp just to steal information – the story itself was very forgettable. I could somehow follow the story of my Norn huntress because it was a simple “find out what the hell is going on with the minotaurs” thing, but I’ve completely forgotten what I was fighting for with my Human engineer or Charr guardian.

There’s also a small issue in that while being able to play the co-op is nice, not giving the co-op player anything to do except combat in a storyline mission is not optimal. In non-combat quests, the accompanying player was just bored. It would be nice if the players could coordinate their strengths a bit, so that during the infiltration attempt I mentioned before, one player charms a bandit, while the other pickpockets another, even if the main player wasn’t a thief.

Other than that, the storyline quests were OK. Perhaps they get better later but for now I can’t say they really drew me.

And finally, I’d like to quickly mention some thing that bothered me.

Racism/Sexism

I’m afraid the ArenaNet dropped the ball on this one. Not that I had particularly high hopes about it.

There’s practically no people of colour that I saw in the game. Almost all the humans and Norn are the whitest of whites. Almost no dark-skinned people, no people with asian features, almost nothing. Maybe 1 in 20 NPCs you saw would be a PoC. Even on character creation you’d be hard pressed to make a character that had facial features that were distinctively non-caucasian. Well, at least (when I was paying attention) 1 in the 8 classes in the selection was dark-skinned.

And then there’s the presentation of women. The good news is that female armour from what I saw does not egregiously increase the skin-showing percentage, so most of the time, you can be a woman who dresses seriously for battle. The bad news is that of all the starting archetypes for women were wearing ridiculous shit. The Norn Mesmer was the most absurd, showing off as much a skin as if she was going to a sexy gala, and not in the midst of battle. All the others followed similar motifs, showing boob windows, thighs and midriffs whenever possible. The only exception was the Norn-Engineer who was wearing a bad-ass leather trench coat. Pity she doesn’t start with it 🙂

There’s other issues here that bothered me. Such as the fact that all the character you can create, range from wispy to well-trained young adults. You cannot seemingly be old or frail. You also cannot be overweight. I don’t understand why MMORPGs don’t provide these options which would really improve the look of the game as you’d see a variety of characters as PCs and NPCs, and not the (for all intents and purposes) identical body type running around.

On the bright side, the Charr females are awesome. Since the Devs didn’t feel the need to cater to the Male Gaze on the Charr, their women look bad-ass from the get go. Easily on par with the males.

A small problem with the party system and overflow servers

One thing that really annoyed us when there were two of us playing, was on how the overflow got in the way of us playing together. You see, the overflow server is where you get put to play the game, when your own server’s world instance is full. This isn’t an issue at all normally, but the fact that you and a friend might join the main instance and one of you gets put in the overflow and the other doesn’t is a bit annoying. Because you can’t see each other anymore and you can’t even join the same instances like that. The only solution we found was for one to teleport out and in again, and hope we end up in the same instance of the main world.

The lag. Oh my gawds the lag!

The start of the pre-order beta weekend was a disaster. For the first 3 hours that I tried to connect on Friday, it was impossible. When I did manage it, it had so much lag that it was almost unplayable. On Saturday things were better and I was happily playing until 8pm or so, at which point the USA woke up and started trying to login, which promptly brought down the authentication servers and kicked me off. I only managed to reconnect at 1am or so. Sunday had no problems, so that’s good.

What Frames per second

The game was not using my graphics card at all. At least according to the info I’ve found, this is deliberate, and the game is CPU-bound. Fortunately I won’t get situations with 12 FPS again in the released version.

Crafting / Junk Collection

While crafting is not anything particularly annoying by itself. It is made so by the fact that to craft you need to bring your shit from the bank, drag them to the crafting bench and then go back to the bank to store them. And if you forget one, do this again. With the Charr, fortunately the bank was close, but with the humans and Norn, it involved a teleport. This was just annoying.

There’s some good ideas, like the fact that you can “teleport” crafting material to the bank when you find them in the world, thus saving you some inventory space. Unfortunately you can’t do this for all material, so you end up carrying a lot of teeth, bones and blood with you. Not a particularly big deal. What more annoyed me is all the junk you gather from the game and how they clutter your inventory. They are not a big deal by themselves and I don’t mind them taking a bit of inventory space, but I would really prefer if they had a secondary inventory called “junk” and they put all that stuff there, just so that I don’t have to shift through them every time I wanted to look at what useful stuff I’m carrying. They also need a “Sell all junk” button on merchants.

Content

This is more of a concern than a complaint. Given how common dynamic events were in the world, I am concerned on if they’ll manage to keep up this level of content for 80 whole levels, plus dungeons and renown hearts and whatnot. This is a lot of content to fill and I am afraid that there just won’t be enough time and ideas. I wouldn’t want to start the game and quickly discover that after level 25-30, there’s something like 1 dynamic event per level.

the good news is that because of the level adjustment that happens when one goes to a lowe level, there’ll always be “end-game-content” to do, in the form of all the renown hearts and dynamic events you haven’t done in the rest of the world. In this case, the “questing” system that GW2 by itself saves the day, as you are not locked out of content just because you’re exceeded its level requirements. I am not sure if the rewards for it scale as well, but I think I read somewhere that they do.

Epilogue

Whew, that was a larger post than I expected

I will say that after playing this first beta, I’m just as much, if not more excited for the game than I was. In the next pre-order beta I think I’ll concentrate more of PvP scenarios, particularly on WvWvW just to see how they play, and also to avoid spoiling all the single player experience for when the game comes out.

In the end, I truly think GW2 has some amazingly good innovations that will certainly change the way MMORPGs are made in the future. Yes, It is that good.

 

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Where Moviebob basks in his elitist ignorance

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Moviebob criticises the critics by shoving his foot squarely in his mouth.

So The Game Overthinker decided to address the controversy about the ending of Mass Effect 3 and in it, Moviebob manages to cram so many stawmen, that I thought my PC would overheat. As someone who has played the Mass Effect games (extensively), unlike Moviebob who feels capable of expressing an opinion on hearsay and assumptions, I felt compelled to point out that many many ways that he has completely failed to address the issue at hand, in favour or basking in his own elitism.

“You can’t have a different ending for each minor choice”

First of all, he is amazed that people are upset that there aren’t many different endings for “every little variable”, which just shows not only the fact that he hasn’t even heard someone explain the ending to him, but he hasn’t even bothered to do cursory research on the extent of the lack of choice in the endings and why fans are upset about it. Seriously, this is not hard to find, and for someone who has already claimed he will probably never play the games, the use of spoilers should not be an issue in their drive to do justice to the critics and other point of view.

But this is not done in the slightest, because it wouldn’t then be as easy to paint critics “entitled” brats much as he is expecting due to how he has seen comic nerds act.

So let me make this clear, Bob, this is not part of the criticism in the slightest. Almost nobody is asking to have a different ending depending on each minor choice we made in the game. You would have known this had you done your homework. It would have been nice to have, but most people wouldn’t have minded had the minor stuff been ignored ((Althought I fail to see how they couldn’t even address these within a text-only epilogue)).

“Nobody won a Pulitzer for Choose-Your-Own story books”

This argument is given to show that audience-driven choice is counter-productive to good story telling. This is based on absolutely nothing but some previous bad books and live theatre. This is only used as a beach-head to once again point out gamer entitlement when he claims that “people think they should be part of the story team, and the story should thus be changed to cater to their preferred whims”. This is so stunningly inaccurate on where the criticism actually is, that it can only be seen as a deliberate insult.

Bob completely misses the fact that almost everyone admits that Mass Effect 3 was brilliant, except for the 10 last fucking minutes. For a story driven by something that can only be as good as a “fucking choose-your-own story book”, this seems to be a resounding success. The only reason ME3 is not being hailed as an immense success of the audience-guided model of storytelling is because the ending so thoroughly sucked that it was bad enough to retroactively go back in time and make Mass Effect 1 and 2 feel less good as well. If they hadn’t managed to fuck the closure so absolutely, you wouldn’t be here making this argument, Bob.

It is not a “whim” to point out that the ending was downright atrocious. You are acting like an insufferable elitist jerk to imply that we’re trying to modify the story in a hundred different ways. We’re trying to modify the story in a way that makes sense, acknowledges some of our major choices, even a bit and hopefully provides some closure. This is not a lot to ask for, Bob, in a game built around choice. The failure to provide these is not a failure of the choice-driven storytelling. This is a failure of the developer who can’t even provide the absolute minimum of their fans expectations. The absolute minimum, Bob.

You would know that had you played the game, or read about the criticism, or, you know, engaged in any way with the community you broadly paint as entitled brats…

“If your choices are different in some way, depending on the choices you made, then Bioware didn’t lie”

Then, after Bob allows us to be upset (jeez, thanks?) he then start with a ridiculous amount of strawmen. First is the above quote where he claims that critics say that Bioware lied to them.

Well, you see Bob, the choices were not different in some way depending on the choices you made. In fact, I will go right ahead to point out that it doesn’t actually matter what choices you took. The endings are not different. One can be the nicest fuzziest paragon, or the nastiest puppy-kicking renegades, and it wouldn’t change the 3 choice of endings in the slightest. And no, just slapping 3 choices in the end, completely disconnected from everything else you did in the rest of the game, except from an arbitrary number that you have to grind via a minigame or multiplayer, does not count!

So while I wouldn’t call it lying (as that implies a specific intent), I will call it a catastrophic failure on Bioware’s part.

“Bioware owes me”

Another strawman that Bob uses in different ways, and the last version, in which he claims that a common point is that “Bioware owes the fans a different ending because they were very invested in the story”, is just…I dunno, cringe-worthy? I mean, sure, there are idiots out there who might actually make this argument, but to present this as a major point in your criticism Bob, are you serious? This “you owe me” is a marginal opinion at best, Bob, and you’re presenting it with a multiple of different versions as if it’s one of the most common complaints. You disingenuousness is amazing.

Fans, by the large, do not want a better ending because Bioware owes it to them. They want a better ending because they love the franchise so much, they do not want it to see go down in flames due to how bad it ended. And yes, Bob, it is that bad comparatively. It is not at all weird that it’s the most passionate fans that are feeling most burnt by the “conclusion” (hah!), while the impassionate critics who haven’t even bothered to play the game to completion, like you, Bob, sit on the sidelines taking potshots at the fringe opinions and painting everyone with the same brush.

The reason why fans want Bioware to change the ending is because it ruined the universe, and it ruined the story they were telling about Shepard. The former is ruined, both literally (which I cannot expound upon without spoilers) and in the meta sense as it was so counter to everything they had on the lore until now, that it retroactively went back and wiped whole parts of canon. The latter is ruined because Shepard’s story didn’t matter. At all. But alas, We can’t expect a self-professed critic to know what they’re criticising first…

The outrage is here because most people are angry that 1. Their personal Shepard story didn’t matter and was completely out-of-character. 2. They are so disgusted by it, that they will never be able to enjoy either any new ME content in this canon, or even the previous content they were enjoying until now.

“The medium will never be taken seriously as long as you’re all so entitled”

And here Bob, you spew the largest load of garbage I’ve ever seen.

You claim that the medium will never be taken seriously when the audience is so passionate about the story, that they cannot accept the canon that has been given to them?Hey Bob, remember Arthur Conan Doyle? I guess Books are not taken seriously by “the broader culture” now?

And this proves that we do not take games seriously, how exactly? What kind of argument is this, Bob? Where does it stand? You claim that if ME wants to get the same “serious analysis” as Movies and Books, we need to accept the same limitation? This is absolute nonsense of the worst degree. First of all, no, Bob, fans have not been claiming that Video Games are similar to Movies and Books, they have simply been claiming that video games are a form of art. To claim from there that they are similar and should have the same limitation, is equivocating, Bob. It would be akin that Movies should be judged by the “broader culture” in the same way that painting are!

In what world is this a compelling argument? Video Games are art, but they are a different form of art in which case interactivity can very well take part. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t and “it cannot be done” or “you won’t be taken seriously” is not an argument. In fact, Mass Effect is the perfect sample that what you say is absolute nonsense. Had the ending not been so atrociously bad it would have been one of the first samples of games as interactive art that would have been both immensely successful and taken seriously by “the broader culture”.

This is another reason why many people are criticising the ending on the basis of being bad art, because it destroys this perfect opportunity. I am not so much dismayed  by the lack of choice in the ending. I am dismayed because the lack of choice destroys such possibility for the video game medium as a whole (which cheapens the medium). I am dismayed that professional critics like you Bob, feel the need to throw in your two cents on an issue you have not bothered to understand, therefore proving that video game critics actually suck (which cheapens the medium). I am dismayed that all the professional reviewers of the game praised it without even finishing it and then turned around and snubbed their noses at those who actually know what they are talking about (which cheapens the medium). I am dismayed that it takes an outsider with no conflict of interest in the game’s success to point out hypocrisy in the detractors of the critics (which cheapens the medium).

This is what is not making the “broader culture not take the medium seriously”. It is cultural dinosaurs like you, Bob, who need to shape everything into their own preconception of “serious art” before you accept it. Where in the age of unprecedented capacity for criticism and constructive feedback, you have to ask everyone to “sit down,shut up, and let the professionals handle it.”

“Entitled fans” has become the keyword of the moment, and is being thrown around by every established entity in the reviewing industry and their peripheral “serious critics”. It feels like we’re being likened to the “unwashed masses” flinging shit at the ivory towers of the enlightened few who feel their precious art is being dragged down by our lowly opinions. It stinks of elitism and snobbery and I am glad that slowly more and more people are picking up that there’s no reason to rely on the self-proclaimed “professionals” with established conflicts of interest or critics with outdated cultural assumptions, rather than our own opinions.

I find a future in which the audience of a game/book/movie can reach the ear of the creator directly, to be a far brighter one, than one in which we passively consume and hope some critic is lucky enough to have an effect.

Is Game Piracy, as a form of protest, counter-productive? (A response to the Cynical Brit)

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Totalbiscuit makes an impassionate plea for people to boycott Mass Effect 3 but refrain from pirating it. I explain why Piracy is once again the better choice.

Image representing Electronic Arts as depicted...

So the Cynical Brit addressed the issue of the Mass Effect 3 DLC and touched on the issue of Piracy and how it will affect the dynamics of the situation if people Pirate the game rather than simply abstain from playing it. As expected from what I heard him say last time, he is horribly wrong on what effects piracy of Mass Effect 3 as a form of protest is going to have.

But lets take CB’s arguments one by one and see why they are flawed.

First of all, lets address CB’s proposed tactic, which is that people who dislike the Day 1 DLC should boycott the game on launch day and instead buy it later on when it becomes cheap enough ((CB also makes some classic anti-piracy arguments, such as the idea that Piracy is unethical or that it is killing the PC Game industry. I’ve already addressed these in length in my series on Piracy, so I won’t repeat myself in this post.)) :

The idea is extremely naïve. It rests on the assumption that people not buying the game, will send a clear message to Bioware and EA that the Day 1 DLC is the problem and they’ll have to change their act to make people buy their game. Unfortunately this ignores the reality of markets and how they are notoriously bad at transmitting information back to the seller. If a boycott was actually organized and it did actually get enough people sticking to it, then EA is still unlikely to understand where the problem lies. The only information they will see is less sales than their expectations, maybe (because it may be the case that their expectations were lower in the first place). This does not tell them anything more than that. Was it because of the Day 1 DLC? Of Technical Bugs? Of Misjudging the market? Of Changed gameplay? Or of Piracy?

You can bet your sweet ass that whatever the real reason of your boycott is, Piracy will be blamed if it succeeds. It doesn’t matter how many letter you send, how many petitions you sign, how many pre-orders you cancel (well, maybe, but pre-orders are the minority of purchases); In the board of directors meeting, the managers will blame Piracy.  You know why? Because it will absolve management of any fault! Managers will declare that Piracy dropped sales and that better DRM and lobbying for laws is needed to combat this disaster.

They will do this even if they have read thousands of letters announcing that it was the DLC (or bugs, or changed gameplay, or whatever else) that caused it and they will waste resources combating a boogeyman. Why? Because they won’t get fired. If a manager were to admit that they misjudged the DLC effect and take it back, they will be blamed for the “disaster”.  Why take the risk, when the convenient scapegoat of piracy is available?

“Geez, our market research indicated that the sales of ME3 would see a 33% increase compared to ME2, we have done market tudies which proved that the Day 1 DLC would only turn away 10% of purchasers but bring in 20% additional revenue. By gosh golly, we don’t know what happened! Look at the stats yourselves dear investors. It must have been rampant piracy! Oh and what do I see here? Here’s a BSA report from of how piracy increased 160% this year. That is surely the cause!”

The only thing that might actually make people stand up and notice a boycott, rather than blame piracy, would be a significant cancellation of pre-orders with an accompanying note informing them of the reason for this decision. Then they might receive the info they need and fix it before it’s too late (as is what happened with BF3, which is a special situation in itself). But if they don’t, piracy is going to be blamed anyway.

This has been shown again and again. The hilarious Modern Warfare boycotts are the most recent examples, where people would boycott, but the games had increased in popularity so much, that the boycott didn’t even register in the radar. Thus people said “fuck it” and bought it anyway. Then there is the boycott of Spore due to its draconian DRM. This even spilled over in Amazon with an incredible amount of 1-star reviews and other kinds of activism. Even in the face of all this, the publisher still refused to acknowledge the real reason why sales of Spore were atrocious (Draconian DRM and bad Gameplay), but rather conveniently blamed Piracy.

The Cynical Brit is incredibly naïve in this regard. He expects that Management of big publishers is both honest and competent and will take an objective look into the situation of a successful boycott and then take the correct action in the future. But except the fact that management is much more often than not completely incompetent (eg see: Bobby Kotick running successful franchises into the ground (among other failures).), they have no incentive to be honest either.

Next, CB addresses Piracy and how “having your cake and eating it”, in other words pirating the game as a form of protest, is actually counter-productive. The argument is that the companies are then going to ignore the boycott and blame it on piracy. It thus makes more sense (according to CB’s logic) to simply abstain from playing the game and show “backbone” in one’s decision, so as to convince the companies to change their ways.

But as I argued before, companies are going to blame Piracy in case the boycott is successful (or simply the game price is below its subjective value for most consumers, thus making them ignore it). A few thousand people boycotting the game on principle and sending impassionate letters are not going to make a difference. In face, this is very likely to lead to many to break their boycott simply because they are too eager to play. This form of tactic is in itself counter-productive, because it assigns the “pain” of the boycott, to the few thousand people who are the most passionate about the game ((and let’s be realistic here, the only people who care about that stuff are the ones who care so much about the story, i.e. the hardcore fans, who are a small minority)). This is a recipe for failure, as the Modern Warfare boycotts made painfully obvious.

Piracy however can combat this. People can get their “fix” of the game and avoid rewarding the company for a substandard product at the same time. The “pain” of bad decisions is immediately transferred to the company making them, and thus it allows even more people to participate in a boycott, without having to battle with their own drive to play their favourite franchise.

In the end, pirating the game and simply abstaining from buying the game are going to have the same exact results. Piracy is going to be blamed anyway. Protesting people will “vote with their wallet”.  You can still buy the game later on, when it’s price has dropped to its true value given DLC and DRM restrictions. You can still cancel your pre-order and claim that Day 1 DLC drove you to do so.

If everyone who boycotts the game pirates it instead, you’re going to have a few extra thousand downloaders in the stats. This is among millions that are going to download the game anyway because they can’t afford it or can’t purchase it through legal means. Whether you show “backbone” or not, is not going to make the slightest difference in the rhetoric the publisher is going to use whether the game is successful or not.

So do yourself a favour, if the Day 1 DLC is a deal breaker, vote with your wallet and pirate the game until the price goes down to an appropriate range. Then the only one suffering will be the one deserving it, the publisher.

 

Related articles

7th Sea CCG on OCTGN

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I’ve finished creating all the 7th Sea CCG sets and now I invite you all to join me for a game.

Recently I’ve finished porting all the 7th Sea CCG sets to OCTGN and like my previous post about Doomtown, I thought I’d make a post on how to  setup and play the game.

First of all an introduction for those not in the know:

The 7th Sea CCG is a defunct collectible card game based around naval combat in all forms. From blasting your opponent’s ship to splinters with your cannons, to boarding them and hacking them to bits. It plays around the common theme of Swashbuckling Pirates and Privateers and thus you do stuff such as send your crew on adventures and generally try to control the 5 seas the game is played in.

Deck building revolves around many things:

  • Selecting what faction you want to play, as there are dedicated pirates, army captains, chartered privateers and even the undead, each with their own rich history, story and gameplay tendencies.
  • Deciding what basic strategy you’re going to use to achieve victory: Big Cannon Attacks, Small Cannon attacks, Boardings, A bit of this and a bit of that, Controlling the Seas or some other wacky experimental build – like playing the Viking Raiders and using your Laerdom sorcerers to destroy opponent’s ships through weather catastrophes.
  • Deciding on the type of cards you’re going to use, as too much of one card might make you strong in your chosen tactic, but might cripple you if you’re ever trapped in a boarding.

And there’s a lot of other fine strategies in deckbuilding that emerge once you start to understand how the game works and the cards interact with each other.

The game is primarily designed for 2 players playing as opponents, but you can easily play it with more, albeit a Free-For-All is not recommended. However some of my fondest experiences with card games were when playing this game as 2 vs 2 team matches.

EDIT @ 02/07/2013 : I’ve moved the installation instructions on to the dedicated page for this game definition. Please follow the step-by-step installation instructions for 7th Sea CCG there.

Now that we have the game ready, the only thing that is left is to find someone to play with. Fortunately, the new OCTGN 3 has a built-in game lobby capability, which means that whenever you go to the host/join tab, you’ll see any available game lobbies for the games you have installed, and if you host a game, anyone with the same game can see it and join. Unfortunately the 7th Sea CCG is even less active than Doomtown which means it is unlikely anyone will be hosting or looking to join a game at the same moment you are. Even worse, there’s not even a specific community for the 7th Sea CCG. There’s a Facebook group with 4 people (at this time) which you might ask in, A Facebook page with more fans, but related to all things 7th Sea, which for most people is only the RPG, and of course our own OCTGN Game fora where you may inquire if anyone if up for a game. But very likely, your best bet would be to contact me directly 😉

The 7th Sea CCG version for OCTGN is not yet as automated as Doomtown, mostly because I “power” my motivation to code this stuff depending on how much I actually play the game and thus see areas for streamlining and improvement. Given that I haven’t managed to find a single person to play with (something which I hope to change with this post), it’s no surprise that the scripting behind it is minimal. Still, I do plan to improve it as much as I can, even if I don’t play much personally. Eventually I hope to make it as streamlined to play as possible and take away much of the “carpal-tunnel” tediousness that online play introduces to card games as well as help players avoid common mistakes done while playing complex games.

If you do get to play a game with your friends and find things that annoy or could simply be improved, do contact me and I’ll work on it as soon as possible. And of course, spread the word.

Enjoy!

 

Yet more proof that all MOBA (AKA DotA-clone) communities are absolute shit.

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I’ve spoken in length about how sexist S2 and Heroes of Newerth is, which is not surprising given how bigoted their CEO is, and other have written about how Riot games and League of Legends is not far behind in providing fan service and all the other things that implies. But I still had some hope for DotA 2,which was being developed after all by Valve, which has at least somewhat a better record at how it presents women, as seen by the absolute top male nerd fantasy: Alyx Vance. Sure, their promo images of the game characters were obviously sexist and others have raised concerns about the direction the community was taking already, but hope dies last as they say, so despite all this, and despite the fact that MOBA communities are the absolute scum of the earth, I wanted to believe that some Valve guidelines and strong moderation might improve things

How wrong I was.

It seems that the DoTA2 community is shaping to be as bad, if not worse than the S2 community and the all-powerful report function isn’t having any effect whatsoever, especially given that the moderators are actually of the same shitty opinion as the rest of their scumfuck players.

There’s really not much else to say, that the community can’t say by itself. Some choice quotes

I’m not homophobic and I call people fags all the time.

george just come out of the closet already

Because, of course, only secretly members of marginalized communities might ever be against their oppression. This argument would be so bad if it wasn’t so fucking common.

For example, I have multiple homosexual friends including one who enjoys dressing up in feminine clothing and a wig, putting on make-up, to become his alternate persona “Greere Grimes”. He has 2 or 3 friends that do this as well regularly. When we see each other at the gym and talk to each other, and he says something such as (This is a true story), “Did you see the guy at the check-in? OH MY GOD I couldn’t breathe!” and I laugh and go “Dan you’re such a fag ahahah”, he chuckles and says “Oh I know! I’m gonna go talk to him” and viola. There is no offense taken because he understands that while society attaches negativity to the word, he knows I personally do not and as well, he is in fact a faggot and is fully comfortable with it.

This is the same person who as Greere Grimes was at a bar and left early without his friends, while 3 men followed him outside and broke multiple ribs as well as giving him many bruises including a black eye. These was a hate crime and the 3 men are still at large. He was in the hospital for 4 days.

Someone who understands the hate that people can have in their hearts, and HE is comfortable with someone calling him a faggot?

[…]

I will continue to call people faggots until nobody is offended. And then I will use the word to refer to homosexuals. Because that’s what it’s already supposed to be doing.

 

There are no words…

I don’t get offended at asian jokes being asian myself

Nor do I get hurt by random t2s randomly throwing out racial slurs and happen to hit one

Never will be and never have been.

If I talk to my mexican friend and say something about her getting smuggled over the border she will just laugh.

If I talk to my blonde friend and tell her a really crappy dumb blonde joke she wont care.

Someone please bring out the Special Snowflake award.

This is like black people still crying about shit all the time. “Yo we can say nigger but if you white people say it that shit racist yo”

^ THIS WAS A GAME MODERATOR SPEAKING ^

Same game moderator went ahead to complain about how hard straight white mailes have it. Seriously.

Anyone who actually posts in here and tries to defend it saying that its hurtful are gay. Straight up I want your wiener in my mouth gay. Now get your ass outa the closet and stop being a white knight of the internet.

Quality

I gave up shortly after the last quote.

SWTOR is just WoW with Lightsabers

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SWTOR is just WoW with better graphics and more immersion in a Star Wars setting. AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.

A World of Warcraft Orc with a space helmet, floating above the earth, while a Dragon is flying in space.There, I said it.

…But mostly just to troll those butthurt by the statement 😛

There is however some truth in the title statement. SWTOR is for almost all practical purposes, a “reskin” of WoW, with better graphics, better story and full voice acting. You see, when someone makes this statement, they’re expressing something specific, something that most people who have played WoW can instantly notice behind the thin veneer of polished dialogue – that the gameplay mechanics are not just fundamentally the same, they are exactly the same as in WoW.

Yes, many people at times have compared new MMORPGs to WoW, or called them clones of it, but much of the time this was an unwarranted comparison, which is why such sentiments were never particularly common or popular. However the single most common opinion expressed about SWTOR is that it’s basically WoW in Space. Why is it that this comparison comes so naturally and so often to gamers, when it so uncommon against other games? I’ve seen a lot of other MMORPGs come and go, but very rarely has this comparison been so popular among their critics.

The answer is that even though many of the other games might have shared some core aspect of MMORPG gameplay, as it’s been refined by Everquest and later on by WoW, they nevertheless included a lot of interesting innovations to make their gameplay stand out. I am not an MMO expert, but from the little I know: Conan had a completely different combat system, Warhammer online had its Overall campaign which relied on a dynamic conquest mode, D&D Online has a completely different leveling/class system and significant innovations in questing (eg the Dungeon Master). All these make these games stand out in their own way in regards to gameplay. Even if they didn’t manage to dethrone WoW as a fantasy MMO, they still helped to advance the gameplay of the genre of MMORPGs as a whole, by experimenting with incremental or sometimes revolutionary changes and see how well they work.

And even small gameplay changes can have significant effects on the dynamics and the “feel” of a game. This is how FPS manage to stay fresh, even though they’re all the same “point & click” if you get right down to it. SWTOR fans love to sarcastically respond “Yeah, and CoD is Doom with Snipers” in an attempt to point out that all FPS’ have the same control scheme. But the changes that differentiate between CoD and Doom and FPS in general, are not in the control scheme, which has to stay the same if a game will be in the same class and also instantly convenient/familiar to FPS players. Such sarcastic remarks,deliberately or not, misunderstand where the innovation in FPS happens. It is in the weapon mechanics, in the player health, in the player speed, in the implementation of cover mechanics (or not). These changes may be minor on first look, but due to the emergent dynamics of fast-paced games like FPS, they grow up to change the whole pacing. Consider for example that Quake 3:Arena and Unreal Tournament came out at roughly the same time. They were both very similar theoretically. Both had a sci-fi theme, both had fast-paced PvP-only focus,  both had some  weapons with similar use (rocket launcher, machine gun, shotgun), same type of game modes (FFA, Team Battle, Capture the Flag) and so on. And yet, the games, aside from the core “point & shoot” gameplay, play nothing alike. The game just feels completely different instantly.

And this unfortunately is not true for WoW and SWTOR. The games feel exactly the same. The gameplay feels like someone took WoW, improved the graphics, switched to sci-fi, renamed the abilities and classes and called it a day.

It is mistaken to mention the core similarities of FPS when trying to prove how dissimilar WOW and SWTOR are. This is because the core similarities of MMORPGs are on a different level. If we exclude strong outliers like EVE Online or Dofus, and simply look at the more focused example of “Theme Park MMORPGs”, the core mechanics – that is to say, the gameplay features that have been incrementally improved, shown to function well and most players of the genre are familiar with – are the 3rd person view, skill with cooldowns, quests, combat, levels & classes, and item seeking. At the root of all Theme Park MMORPG (TP MMORPG), all these exist in some form. Note however the last part: “In some form“. The fact that all such games include these tried & proven & expected mechanics in no way means they are clones of each other, because there’s still the differentiation happens on a layer on top of that, much like the differentiation of FPS happens on the layer above having a point & shoot, first person, multi-weapon game.

What is that layer? That is the layer where you decide exactly how the core mechanics function.

  • Just how exactly are your skills with cooldowns are implemented in combat? How many can you have active? Do they use some form of “mana”? How?
  • How many levels do you have? How do you gain them? How are they limiting the player in the world? What does a difference in levels interact in PvP?
  • How are your quests activated? How are they completed? What is the usual types of quest? How many types do you have? When completed, is there any change in the world as the other players perceive it? How are parties created and how do they function?
  • How do classes differentiate? Are they using a “holy trinity” setup? How are they progressing on their early levels? How does specialization happen? At which point?
  • How do you find powerful items? How many kinds are there? How do people split the loot?
  • What is the combat flow? Are there other mechanics outside of skills with cooldowns? Does maneuvering and a player’s  skill make a significant difference given equal characters in power?

These are all the kind of questions that show how and where a TP MMORPG differentiates in gameplay from the other TP MMORPGs. A game which has significant changes in some of these, is usually changing its emergent gameplay and the general feel of the game so much, that it cannot possibly be considered a clone of another. Sure, fanboys of one game may call it a clone of their favourite game so as to discourage other players from jumping ship, but such voices are usually easily dismissed by those who experience it.

However, when almost nothing is different in all these aspects, aside from cosmetic changes (such as disabling auto-attack) or simple streamlining, then games feel and play practically the same. And this is sadly the case of SWTOR compared to WoW.

  • The skills with cooldowns? Same exact mechanic. There is a cosmetic change in that your basic attack is now a skill as well and is not automatic but other than that, I haven’t seen a significant difference.
  • The level mechanic is the same. A level cap is 50 (WoW was 60 at launch), you have areas with specific level requirements/expectations, you defeat everything of a significantly lower level easily, at the max level, the things that will keep your interest are very different from everything before.
  • The classes all start at a safe area specific to them. The classes all have skills dedicated to a role of the holy trinity designed for  them (healer, tank and DPS). The classes all select a specialization at level 10. There is a skill tree and you get or improve your skills with money.

And so on and so forth. Won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say, the rest of the list is very much the same trend. There are cosmetic changes here and there but nothing particularly noteworthy. SWTOR fans at this point usually try to point out that this is the standard recipe for TP MMORPGs, so why should SWTOR change what is working? But that’s the thing, this isn’t the standard recipe for such games, all of them have at least a few significant changes in their gameplay. If they hadn’t, they would rightly have been called “WoW with ____” as well.

SWTOR hasn’t even attempted to put their own unique spin on mechanics. It’s just a shameless copy-paste of the mechanics that WoW has perfected, into a different theme. And there is nothing inherently wrong with that, mind you. I have nothing against a game doing this, so that someone can have the same gameplay they know and love, but in a theme they prefer. Some people are all for that as a matter of fact, and just shinier graphics and Star Wars are enough to make them switch.

But at least call a spade, a spade. Nobody is bashing SWTOR for being what it is. When people mention that SWTOR is simply “WoW with lightsabers”, they express something specific, that perhaps is not immediately obvious. From what I understand it is “I am tired/bored of WoW gameplay (or don’t like them at all) and was looking for something significantly different, but SWTOR is not it.” And again, there’s nothing wrong with that statement either. This is why it perplexes me when the obvious is denied. The obvious being that SWTOR is directed to people who wanted to play WoW – but in sci-fi, or people who wanted to play a Star Wars with the proven gameplay of WoW (or don’t care about the gameplay at all).

SWTOR does have strong and interesting points to notice, but they are not its gameplay innovation. The innovations of SWTOR lie on a different layer entirely: In the layer of the RPG elements and storytelling. In short, exactly the reason they chose Bioware to do this. And yes, from what I’ve seen, the story does seem to be worth it and anyone who liked KOTOR should probably like SWTOR as well. I would personally play it as well if the price was right, but it isn’t (primarily because I personally did not like the WoW gameplay.)

There is no reason for fans of SWTOR to get annoyed and deny that SWTOR is WoW with Lightsabers. The correct answer should be “Damn straight, and that’s all I wanted!”. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

"Here's the problem Bro, sounds like you've never been outside of America."

Db01 Comment

The Privileged and the Masochists are the biggest moralizers online.

Oh gawds, this is the phrase I could say to most of the people I see moralizing against various stuff in Reddit. It’s especially relevant when people criticize video game piracy. In specific, this is the phrase that someone used to put some anti-piracy moralizer in his place. The moralizer said.

They can spend hundreds of $$’s for the original console but can’t afford $10 for a used game?

If it costs an arm and a leg for a new legit game, it must cost them several bodies for a console itself.

It all comes down to buying games you can afford. If they can’t afford MW3 because it is $60, buy older games that are $10.

To which the user pikatu replied:

Here’s the problem Bro, sounds like you’ve never been outside of America. Games in Australia are $100. Do you know how much games in Brazil Cost? 6 month old games are USD$140 [Citation]. What does the average person make in salary in Brazil at USD?

The minimum wage set for the year of 2011 is R$7,080.00 or R$545 per month plus an additional 13th salary in second half of December. Wikipedia

This is why piracy will never go away. Most people play games, will not have money to buy a new game Finally, seeing as how the xbox 360 costs them 581.1743 US dollars Walmart. 4 games cost as much as 360. Older games. With the income they make, they cannot afford it. Piracy is huge in Brazil AND in China, and other third world countries. You talking complete shit while ignorant of how economics works isn’t going to help at all.

So succinctly said and such a great example to point out where most of the piracy is coming from and why.

This kind of mentality – of the clueless First Worlders who projects their own social status on the rest of the world – is frustratingly common. I encounter it almost daily online, and most often than not, it comes from the most moralizing and least empathic people available.

The original commenter then replied

I’m from New Zealand actually. Games here are between $120 and $150.

I’m a student, so I buy games that I can afford. The only brand new game I’ve actually ever bought was Starcraft 2, which I saved up for over 4 months.

I make about $4,000 a year so I don’t buy new games, I buy old games for $5 or $10, and I make less than the average wage of a Brazilian. Granted, though, the games are easier for me to procure in New Zealand.

Which points out the second class of people who like to moralize. The masochists. And if there’s anyone better at moralizing than the privileged, it’s the tools. The 53 percenters and the oppressed who can’t tolerate those more oppressed by themselves jumping up the privilege ladder. Here is someone who had to pay something like half his allowance to buy one game and instead of thinking there’s something wrong with that, and how they’re being excluded from popular culture just because of their economic situation, they’d rather that everyone else is excluded as well, only more so.

It’s the absurdity of not finding ways to improve your own shitty situation, but making sure those in a shittier one don’t get to bypass you.

Why I'm excited about Guild Wars 2

Db05 Comments

Guild Wars 2 is going to be awesome, and here’s my two primary reasons for thinking so.

After my first impressions on SW:TOR the other day, I thought I’d mention why Guild Wars 2 has made me not only take notice but get genuinely excited about, since WoW in 2005. Specifically I thought I’d post about this since I found two excellent videos on the things  I found awesome to have in an MMORPG.

First: Dynamic Events

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdydcMu8u5I#t=30s

The video also doesn’t mention that each dynamic event is composed of a cluster of different quests, each of which actually progresses towards completing that event. So you could be defending a smithy from a kobold assault, and you could be either fighting the kobolds, or repairing damage inflicted on the smithy, or gathering required minerals to fuel it, or manning a catapult and so on. This allowed each player to help towards the dynamic event objective, by finding an activity they prefer, or even swap activity in the middle, if the one they do is boring.

If this sounds promising, Check out this detailed look by the game designers.

Second: The Death of the Holy Trinity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xGDL6QVL-8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wab8xhnXyGA#t=30s

Now this is something I’m really eager to see in action. I always found the way that a game locked you into a role and then made some roles boring but necessary to be completely anti-fun. I love the idea that I may be playing a tanky wizard and then instantly switch to a DPS skill set if I lose aggro, while whoever gets targeted can tank up if needed. Hell, just the idea that I can play a tanky wizard makes me happy. I always try to play tanky combat wizards.

There are certainly quite a few other reasons that add to that, but these two concepts  above are the primary changes to standard MMORPG gameplay that add a degree of innovation I believe will make the game significantly different enough to keep me interested.

Anyone else planning to play it?

 

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