Progress in Warhammer Online continues apace, the game is certainly fairly stable as far as MMOs go, and free enough from coarseness that one can play quite happily without feeling the need to write a stern forum post explaining just how much of an insult the game is to your family, and that the developers might as well come around to your house, poo in the middle of your lounge and attempt to sexually molest your cat, because it would be less offensive to you than trying to play their game. Believe me, such posts have been written in the past and will be written again in the future; I did not write them, but I have witnessed them in all their glory, and like a drunken hobo performing a striptease on the buffet table at a Michelin-starred restaurant, you can feel the awkward silence and embarrassed tension building to a crescendo, even in such a wasteland of emotional expression as a text-based forum.
Of all the minor inevitable niggles that are prominent in my day-to-day gaming, there is one that particularly grates with me. Its importance in the grand scheme of things is so minute that it wouldn’t bother me at all, except for the fact that it exists, and in existing it should not be, because how on earth do you implement such a minor vanity thing and then not have it work? The mind boggles.
“Oh but my dear, dear, dear, dear, dear Lord Melmoth”, I hear you cry, “with it being such a minor vanity item the developers obviously had more important things to fix before release”. A fair point, to which I would feel compelled to respond “But my right honourable, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely darlings, why put the thing in at all when it simply doesn’t work, why not just leave it out?”. And I imagine you would then say “Oh Melmoth, run away with me and let us find a small quiet village in the highlands where we can settle down, start a family together, grow alfalfa and raise rabbits”. Maybe.
A slight derailing of the thought train there. Um… niggles! Right. So this niggle is quite simple, doesn’t affect anything important in the game unless you’re me, in which case it’s more important than working out whether using blocks of cheese as dipping items for a cheese fondue is considered bad form. Simply put: turning the display of your helmet on and off doesn’t work.
No wait, come back, this is important! We’ll do the cheese fondue thing next, I promise!
Look, it may just be me (no ‘may’ about it — Ed.), but why put something like this in to the game when it’s fundamentally broken? Yes, you can turn the display of your helmet off – this is important for me because I find the bald spot on my dwarf to be an excellent reflective surface off of which I can bounce sunlight into the eyes of my foes – but it is reset, well, in every situation imaginable. Going into a scenario? Helmet resets and is displaying again once you’ve entered. Coming out of a scenario? Helmet resets. Going into an instanced building? Reset. Coming out the building. Reset. Standing around scratching your bum? Reset. Setting your helmet to not be displayed? Reset.
Ok, probably not the last one, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s not the fact that it’s broken, so much, as the fact that someone went to all the trouble of writing the code to get this to do something close to what it was meant to do, and then, what? I mean, they must have seen that the state reverts between world instances, was that really such a terribly time-constrained problem to solve considering they’d had the time to invest in implementing the basic feature in the first place?
“Well Stan, I’ve stuck in the code to turn off the display of helmets, but it doesn’t work in any but the most specific and useless cases, unfortunately they keep re-appearing.”
“Great! Call it a feature! We’ll call them Magic Appearing Helmets. Of Greatness. Plus One. In fact, get marketing to stick it in as a unique item for the Collector’s Edition.”
“Uh, but it’ll happen for everyone.”
“No problem, we’ll just say that we’ve decided to be generous and give magic hats to all. The peasants will love us!”
“The CEO said we weren’t to call them peasants any more, Stan.”
“Oh ok, the plebs.”
“No.”
“Peons?”
“NO.”
“Skinner box rats with a line of credit?”
“Jesus, Stan, I’m out of here.”
“What about the magic helmets?”
“Forget it. I think I’ll go and half-implement the mail box system or something”.