Monthly Archives: November 2008

The sandbox of men who care not where they are going.

In recent times archaeologists have found evidence of board games that were played in ancient Egypt.

What will the archaeologists make of World of Warcraft when they unearth evidence of it in several thousand years time?

Apparently the world was presided over by a group of supreme beings known as ‘noobs’. They were highly regarded in society, as all the other players would cry out their name in praise: “noob! noob!”.

The people of the time spoke in a strange dialect which eschewed vowel sounds. Unftntly it mks ther ancnt txts hrd to dcphr.

Factions worshipped at the temples of various deities whom they believed wielded an ancient power called ‘nerf’; the factions called on their deity to use nerf to smite the unbelievers of other factions.

Art and culture was prevalent, one of the many forms of entertainment involved specially trained young females who performed a traditional dance on top of central places of public communication whilst wearing a ceremonial thong and brassiere.

We are still unsure as to what stfu is, but we believe it is probably a cry of adulation much like ‘halleluiah’, we have based this on the fact that it was often aimed at noobs, who were clearly the focus of much praise as evidenced elsewhere.

There was an oft-worshipped and elusive being referred to simply as The Win, and for reasons we have yet to determine, the ancient peoples would perform many tasks on its behalf.

Special groups would regularly form in the community, travel to a sacred location and perform an indecipherable ritual where they would repeatedly die and resurrect for several hours at a time whilst shouting profanities at one another.

After further investigation it seems that these gatherings were a communal method to promote someone to the supreme rank of noob; evidence suggests that at some point during the gathering everyone would start to chant noob at one particular member of the group, after which point the group would disband and go its separate ways.

High ranking individuals in society would often perform a ritual of mourning for the untimely death of the young and inexperienced; they would set-up camp at the corpse of the deceased and stand watch over them for many hours whilst praying for their return to the world of the living.

We are still unsure as to what L2P is, but we believe that following the traditional speech patterns of the time, it is probably a contraction of the world ‘eltoopee’. The etymology of the word ‘eltoopee’ is lost to the mists of time, but seeing as it was predominantly used in the address of the supreme noobs, it is undoubtedly a term of high praise or an honorific.

Pug was the collective noun for a number of noobs.

Sadly it seems that the people of the time had a very poor quality of life with minimal leisure time, the majority having to perform monotonous, mundane and repetitive tasks for nearly the entirety of their lives.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

What a time to be discovering all the things that one can do in the Old World of Azeroth these days, just as most people teeter on the very doorstep of Mr L. King BSc. MSc. RAth, ready to ring his frost-covered door bell and slip-slide their way down his icy garden path, giggling with glee to themselves as they wait in the hedgerow with a forty man raid of other children, all set to bombard him with snowballs when he answers the door in his dressing gown, slippers and pipe.

My question is thus: am I going to be the only one playing in the narrow reaches of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms come WotLK’s release date? I honestly can’t see myself charging headlong into the new expansion when it arrives, there’s still so much for me to see and do. Having said that my Shaman was the only character for me, I specialised my dwarf paladin into the Retribution talent tree and took him for a spin over the weekend, and I have to say that it was a revelation: sure my Shaman can output even more damage when specialised in the Enhancement talent tree, but for sheer audacious survivability, the paladin is still hard to beat.

Zoso will roll his eyes to the heavens and ‘tsk’ quietly to himself with respect to me switching character focus, in three… two… one…

Although it probably won’t distress him too much because he’s still hammering away at WAR, I feel an apology is still warranted, so: sorry!

Anyway, I had another couple of runs around Azeroth with Elf, where we blasted through some of the low level dungeons that we needed for achievements; a particularly enjoyable speed run through Shadowfang Keep, and a slightly hairy moment in Zul’Farak whilst we were undertaking the ‘assault on the steps’ stage of the instance. Instead of waiting for the mobs to run up the stairs to us in dribs and drabs as is the usual custom, we charged down and took the fight to them. The funny thing was, it wasn’t hairy because of the fight, it was hairy because we destroyed the first wave of enemies so quickly that the event froze and we thought we’d broken the instance. After a minute or so of standing around holding our weapons limply and looking slightly sheepish, the second wave of trolls was clearly pushed out of their hiding place, scrabbling at door frames and dragging fingernails on walls in a vain attempt to stay inside where it was safe and warm and free from the two crazy plate-wearing nutters with big bladed weapons and a glint in their eyes. Whence the fun continued, for us at least. I also took to soloing for a while, running a large part of Stratholme on my own, getting the key to the city and a few of the bosses before stray runners in the Scarlet side repeatedly brought half the instance down onto my head, at which point I decided I needed more practise with the class before I was ready to master soloing instances, and I headed off to explore some more of the Scourge event that is still ongoing instead.

With all the new (to me) content that is available in the Old World I have no intention of heading into Northrend the very moment the boats set sail from Stormwind harbour, if nothing other than because the first boat will have the entire Alliance population on its decks, and I need to be standing on the docks with my camera for when the server gives-up under the load, the boat disappears, and several thousand of Azeroth’s finest warriors are dunked into the ocean and drown before they can reach safe waters.

It’s a Kodak moment.

It’ll be interesting to see how the launch of Wrath of the Lich King develops, but I imagine that I’ll be one of only a few people still to be taking advantage of the new ‘old’ content before heading into the new ‘new’ content. I’ve prepared my character as best I can, mainly by filling his backpack with tissues which I can then hand to the dungeon bosses of yore, whose names once struck fear into groups of forty adventurers, but who are now mainly forgotten, and when they do finally do get a visitor, it is a lone paladin who hands them a tissue before bending their once iron resolve to his will with little more effort than that required to perform a Wuxi Finger Hold.

When the Music’s Over

According to the BBC, “UK sales of games will outstrip music and video for the first time in 2008”. At least, that’s the headline; as pointed out in the article, the main survey being referenced includes games hardware, but the Entertainment Retailers Association have some Quite Interesting statistics that show games overtaking music in sales in 2007 (but lagging behind video). I still pick up the odd album here and there, but after voracious acquisition in my teens and ever-expanding CD racks, I’ve been spending more on games than music for a while, mostly, I think, because aside from a few embarrassing oddities I can still quite happily listen to any of my music collection, whereas I seldom go back to older games apart from the occasional classic. Anyway, it’s soon approaching the point where I have to grumble about all newly released music, it’s just crashing and banging, you can’t hear what they’re singing about, whatever happened to that nice Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson?

It got me thinking about music in games, though. Not so much specifically written soundtracks that only really exist within the game (with the odd exception, I see the Mass Effect soundtrack is due for release towards the end of the month), but more mainstream music. One of the first instances in my collection is Ed Hunter, a combined Iron Maiden compilation and game. Not a particularly great game either, an Operation Wolf-style shooter that would’ve been amazing ten years previously, but didn’t hold up so well compared to System Shock 2 released around the same time. Not a bad “best of” compilation, though, and at least the game is better than the Aerosmith effort Revolution X. Better than crowbarring bands into unrelated game styles is the Guitar Hero/Rock Band series, obviously; sometimes on forums I’ve seen people dismissing one of the games, posting “I hardly know any of the songs on the list”, but that’s half the fun for me. I can’t think of one song in the series that I’ve hated violently enough not to want to play it a few times, and it’s introduced me to quite a few bands. Not just *extends forefinger and little finger* METAL! either, Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives are really rather catchy.

One of the slightly stranger shifts is with radio; between connecting up MP3 players in the car, the BBC’s “Listen Again” service and an ever-expanding subscription list of podcasts, I hardly listen to live radio any more. In games, though, Grand Theft Auto III was a revelation, with its in-game radio stations. Even though, in the PC version, you could play your own MP3s while driving, it was far more fun to flip around the radio stations while cruising Liberty City, mostly because of K-Jah; I’d never heard dub before, and the spooky, subterranean vibes of Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires were a great accompaniment to late-night driving (though the drum and bass of MSX FM was better to get the adrenaline pumping for races), so I picked up the proper album and a bunch of other dub CDs. Vice City is often regarded as the high point of the GTAIII games, but it’s not really my favourite, and I wonder how much of that has to do with the 80s soundtrack, which I didn’t like nearly as much. San Andreas had a better selection, and a quick glance at the GTAIV soundtrack looks most promising, I think I’m going to enjoy flipping through the stations there.

Have I Got MMOnews For You

Host: And the final round is “Continue the Headline”. This week, teams, it’s from Computer and Video Games: “Police in Bradford are on the hunt for a gang of game thieves who made off with 4000 copies of Age of Conan.”

Zoso: “… as the Bradford police guild, ‘Hibernian Fuzz’, has dwindled to a few active players, and they need more people to gather materials for their Tier 3 keep.”

Melmoth: “If caught, the thieves face the maximum possible sentence under the law: up to three years mandatory subscription.”

Host: Goodnight!

Studio lights dim, theme tune plays.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

There has been discussion about World of Warcraft’s Old World content ever since The Burning Crusade was announced, and the discussion has only grown with the ever nearing release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. The discussion mainly centres on revamping or removing the one to sixty levelling game for those players who have already completed it one or more times, but what’s really interesting to me is how much new content is now available to the casual non-raider.

I’ve been pootling around on my restoration spec. shaman, getting him ready for Wrath; I also have a paladin and a druid at level seventy, but this time around I feel that I’ll only have the enthusiasm to level one character all the way to level eighty, and since I roll with the Alliance, keeping my shaman going seemed like a good idea because they’re slightly less populous on the ground than paladins and druids. Added to this is the fact that if I do decide to level an alt I will almost certainly have to play a gnome death knight, if nothing other than to make m’colleague gnash his teeth and yank at his ear lobes in anguish as his eyes redden and fill with watery rage.

I’ve been joined in the game by Elf, a long time veteran campaigner in the lands of Azeroth, and a member of the distinguished League of Gentlemen Levellers, along with Zoso, myself and one other. Zoso is still happily(?) playing Warhammer Online, so yesterday Elf and myself headed in to Stratholme and waltzed through the place, quite literally performing the ancient Dance of Death as we gracefully and serenely slaughtered a path along the ancient streets of the city.

Ok, Elf did all the slaughtering; I mainly just refreshed Earth Shield on his character once in a while and spent the rest of the time gawping at my surroundings. Protection spec. warriors are quite, quite maddeningly powerful these days, it seems.

About halfway through it dawned on me how beautiful a place Stratholme is and I found myself pining for those days when it must have all been new and fresh and unknown. When raids of adventurers would struggle to make headway in the place, but every time they did, every time they forged onwards to the next challenge, they were faced with scenes that surely would produce awe and wonder in even the most hardened MMO veteran. As a city it’s probably not as large as Stormwind but it is as detailed, and that’s what boggled my mind. It’s not inherently beautiful, you understand: a city in ruins, it is a sprawl of crumbling decaying buildings often still on fire, which are infested with undead and other monstrosities; no, it’s the attention to detail that makes it beautiful in both design and experience, that makes it feel so much like a real city which has been abandoned and left for (the) dead. For example: the shops all have signs outside them, and being the inveterate role-player that I am, I couldn’t help wondering who these people were, and where they were now. I imagine there’s a website that details it all, but at that moment in time it infused me with the most delightful sense of astonishment and discovery, that feeling of witnessing something special and epic, a feeling that happens all too rarely in MMOs these days, which saddens me because it’s what MMOs should be about: awe, wonder, discovery, a sense of epic history, a sense of adventure.

A sense of adventure.

This is, I think, what MMOs so often overlook in their quest to be popular and appeal to the masses, they focus so much on the balance, the mechanics, the format and the structure of the game that they forget to add in that quintessential essence of adventure. This is what Blizzard did so well in World of Warcraft, they created so many vistas around the world, so many places and creatures that cause all but the most jaded of players to stop and gawp and marvel at the spectacle of it, to feel proud and content to have discovered and witnessed such a thing, and most importantly to have their desire to experience more fanned until it literally burns within them. This is what ‘experience’ should mean to a player of an MMO, not a two-tone bar that is filled when you kill umpteen thousand token creatures all alike, but a joyous memory of something that you will take away with you and reflect on months or years later, and that you will try to share with others in a way that makes them feel as you did when you experienced it, but which you will never be able to achieve, because the experience was uniquely yours.

Large swathes of this sort of content have, until now, been lost to the truly casual player of World of Warcraft, but no longer, and I urge any of you who have not yet taken the opportunity to visit these Old World instances, to do so. It is no longer beyond the means or capabilities of any player, I am the utmost of carebear-casual dedication-shy players; my shaman is dressed in a few quest and welfare-PvP blues, and Elf’s warrior is not equipped to a much greater extent than that either, and yet we can make our way through as a duo without any effort, and I’m sure that many other classes can, and indeed have, solo’d instances of far greater difficulty. As a duo we have conquered all of Blackrock Mountain barring its molten core, something we will attempt to rectify in the near future.

But if you do go back, promise me this: do not do it just for the tick-in-the-box achievement, promise me that you will go there to discover. To discover these places, to discover lost worlds and lost lives, and to rediscover your own joy and wonder, something that these MMOs can still provide when they are at their very best.

Season of the Witch(ing Night)

WAR’s Witching Night event comes in two basic parts, PvP and PvE. Just to switch things around a bit, the PvP side is a Public Quest: tromp around a somewhat ill-defined bit of a nominated RvR zone in each tier, and kill 100 of Them before They kill 100 of You. The basic problem with this, as those with a keen grasp of maths may notice, is you can’t let Them kill You as much as You kill Them, and that leads to everyone being a bit cagey. It’s an excellent demonstration of why death penalties aren’t an unqualified good idea, the lack of them can make PvP meaningless, but the presence of them can make PvP utterly tedious. The side that’s outnumbered hang around at their warcamp, with siege weapons and heroes to back them up. The side that’s outnumbering them hang around just outside of siege weapon range exploring the communication possibilities of emotes, presumably hoping the other side really hate mimes:
Zoso walks against the wind
Zoso is trapped inside an invisible box
Then you wait and see who gets bored first.

Three times I’ve headed into the RvR/PQ zones. Once was great. The keep and battlefield objectives started out in Destruction hands, when I arrived Destruction players were outnumbered and sticking around their warcamp. A couple of Order warbands eschewed the hanging around and miming option and instead headed off for an objective and the keep. Destruction came out to play, objectives were attacked, defended, captured and recaptured, though almost no kills in the process actually counted for the PQ as they weren’t in the arbitrary PQ area. The final phase only really kicked off when a Destruction force had re-taken the brewery and were pursuing the former defenders when a second Order warband turned up from taking the keep, completing a rather beautiful pincer movement in the PQ area, Order finally ending up with their 100 kills to about 90-odd for Destruction. The only downside was that I wasn’t keeping a close eye on the scores, so when the count ticked up to 100 and Phase II began I didn’t instantly turn and run towards the Witching Lord. I’m not sure what killed me, Destruction players, or the boots and hooves of what had been the Order front line as they trampled me in the process of legging it to the Lord, either way I’d just about respawned back at the camp and was about to mount up when “Rolling for PQ loot…” appeared. Guess the Witching Lord lasted about as long as me, needless to say I wasn’t close enough to get any kill credit.

That was the good. The bad was another time, when Destruction were outside the Order warcamp in force, and everyone had a much higher boredom threshold; in the course of an hour the kill counts had risen to about 10 apiece as both sides glowered at each other, edged forwards a couple of steps, edged back a couple of steps, and waited for the other lot to attack. If there was any way to dig trenches, we’d’ve been set for a re-enactment of Ypres. In real time. Over four years. I emoted sitting down playing a mournful harmonica for a while, wrote a bit of poetry, then gave up and joined scenario queues.

As for the ugly, that was the third time, when Order had the edge in numbers again and Destruction had fallen back to their camp. This time around a few Order players weren’t going to wait them out or head off to another objective and kept trying to attack on their own, falling to siege weapons/hero NPCs/the massed pipes, drums and spells of the Destruction forces. Players in zone/warband chat tried to suggest that everyone backed away from the warcamp, some people did, some didn’t, the kill count kept ticking up, people in zone chat got more annoyed and capitalised, insults started flying, and as exciting as it was to stick around to see how many variations of “NO U STFU” exist, I buggered off with Destruction about 70-50 up. That’s the problem with open RvR in a nutshell: when it’s good, it’s very very good, when it’s bad, it’s ZOMGZ WTF R U DOING??/?

So: one of the goals of the Witching Night event is to kill 10 Witching Lords, and I believe they only spawn as Phase II of the RvR PQ. Time spent in RvR PQ zones: about five hours. Number of Lords killed: zero. Now, according to my mental calculations, that would require me to spend… um, let’s see… carry the 4… precisely “divide by zero error” hours to get the ten needed for the quest. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really got divide by zero error spare hours. Still, not to worry, there’s always the influence rewards, right? Like other public quests, there’s an influence bar to fill, and rewards along the way. Killing other players during the PQ nets you influence; I’m not sure exactly how much, by the time you divide it between a warband or three, if you manage to be involved in 50-odd kills over many hours of tedious stand-offs, you’ve netted yourself a good few hundred influence points. Rewards here we come, woo! Oh, apart from the minor issue that a few hundred influence points is but a tiny fraction of the influence bar.

Off to the PvE areas then. As well as the Witching Lords, there are a couple of other scary mob types, Crones and Spirits, sprinkled around PvE zones. Crones stand around a cauldron; after killing the Crones, interacting with the cauldron spawns a bunch of Spirits, then the whole lot respawns after a while. Spirits also turn up by themselves in a couple of other areas, and both Crones and Spirits are worth 100 influence points each. They’re also not very challenging, at least the ones I bumped into; I could slap a basic Bright Wizard DoT on to them then stand and auto attack, they’d die in a few seconds having barely scratched me. Trouble with this part of the event is that there really aren’t very many cauldrons around, every time I found one there were other people there. If they were Order, I’d try and group up; if they were Destruction, it was a race to tag mobs as they spawned. Either way, not great influence rewards, and lots of standing around waiting for cauldrons to respawned, so after racking up the requisite 25 Crones, I moved on to Plan C. A helpful forum post pointed out a bit of Talabecland where Spirits spawn, I wandered over and started mowing through them. These Spirits spawn in a haze of purple tendrils, and only hang around for a few seconds before vanishing again, so, as they can’t really hurt you, the only challenge is in spotting them, hurtling towards them (ideally avoiding non-Spirit mobs) frantically mashing an instant cast spell until they’re in range, then spinning around and looking for another one; if you can tag them with damage, they stick around until dead. I think three spawn at once, at least that’s as many as I ever managed to simultaneously tag, sometimes they’re conveniently close to each other, sometimes they’re spread too far apart to get more than one. It’s mildly entertaining for a while, and as nobody else was in the area doing the same thing the influence bar filled up at a fair old rate, I got enough for the first reward and headed back to Altdorf to cash in.

I thought that would be it for Witching Night, but then the event was extended, so the next day I popped back to the RvR zone, resulting in the standing around bore-fest detailed previously; then I thought “hmm, those cloak rewards look pretty nifty, I could always grind some more Spirits to fill the second part of the influence bar and get one”. I’ve got a bit of a problem, see, show me a progress bar with a reward, even a fairly inconsequential reward, I have a compulsion to make it go up, push that lever, get the food pellet… If something’s only available for a limited time, the compulsion is correspondingly greater, I’ve spent hours in City of Heroes grinding Christmas presents and Halloween costumes just for badges that have no effect on anything. So I stuck a podcast on, went back to Talabecland, spent another 45-odd minutes grinding out the Spirits while listening to the ever-splendid Mark Kermode, got enough influence for the cloak, and headed back to Altdorf again.

Yesterday… well. The final influence reward is just a mask. Purely cosmetic. It would look silly on a Bright Wizard, and replaces headgear that actually has useful stats so you wouldn’t want to wear it in combat anyway. But… there’s a bar to fill… it’s only available today… I couldn’t help it, back to Talabecland, killing spirits while half-watching television. About halfway through the final bar I was pretty fed up, but by that point as well as the usual “must get reward” compulsion, there’s an additional “if you give up now, you just wasted all that effort”, so I kept on going.

Now I’m in no position to have a go at Mythic for putting in a lengthy, entirely optional, influence grind, having stood around killing hundreds of Spirits for hours on end. It’d be like criticising an electric fence manufacturer after grabbing the wire and going “OW THAT HURTS!” Then grabbing it again. And again. And then getting a free toaster after grabbing it a couple of hundred times, when I didn’t even need a toaster (unless my existing toaster had been taken by an otter to an ice cream factory, which is hardly likely). The mere fact that I (and presumably others) did it vindicates their implementation in some ways. A few tweaks could’ve improved things, though; spawning an awful lot more Spirits and Crones around the place, for example, so you could butcher a load during normal PvE questing rather than having to hunt them down in a few small areas. Making them a bit tougher, or having Champion versions with increased influence rewards, could go some way to alleviate the fact that, being trivial encounters, I could burn through Spirits as fast as they turned up, and any sort of teaming up could serve only to reduce influence gain over time (course it’d have to be a fine balance, or I’d be complaining bitterly about the difficulty of taking them down…) On the RvR side, plenty of other people have made suggestions for tweaking the Public Quest goals, mostly involving bringing objectives or keeps into play to avoid everyone hanging around their warcamp (though you have the problem of needing some way of giving an outnumbered side a chance at winning the public quest, or they’re just not going to bother trying). Definitely room for improvement, hopefully the new scenario for the forthcoming Heavy Metal event will be fun and perhaps liven up the influence grind a bit for that.

A tale of swords and souls, eternally retold.

Fable 2 probably has a fantastic story, but I wouldn’t know because I still haven’t managed to venture much further than Bowerstone Market, the central town location that you first encounter once you’ve passed the introductory child stage of the game. For why? Because the game feels so much like a world, in a way that I wish MMOs could but which they never do, that I haven’t felt compelled yet to follow the instructions given to me by the mysterious woman with the delicious sultry voice of Zoë Wanamaker, to go and be a hero. I’m happy being an ordinary citizen.

Well, I say ‘ordinary’…

Admittedly, my game so far wouldn’t make for much of a re-telling as a tale of yore, unless you like hearing about the deeds of a heroine who spends her entire time in a small market town making swords so that she can buy hot pants, a corset and a wizard hat to wear. The story continues with our heroine seducing and then marrying a vastly be-bosomed member of the same sex and setting her up in their home, which is a small gypsy caravan just outside town. Whereupon our heroine then attempts to make vast amounts of money by crafting yet more sword blades (not sure that the corset and wizard hat are really smithy-suitable clothing, although at least the hot pants are aptly named), only taking time out from behind the forge to travel back to her caravan – with minor diversions along the road to dig up condoms found by her faithful canine companion Vendingmachine – in order to bed her spouse who seems rather demanding when it comes to the amount of time required to be spent scissor fighting in the bedroom.

So basically what I’m saying is that, so far, Fable 2 has been like playing through the first few chapters of some of the more lurid fantasy fanfic to be found on the Internet.

As such I’ll leave the fact that our heroine is known throughout the land by the title ‘Dog Lover’, yelled by town criers wherever she goes, to your own imaginations.

I’m still not certain as to whether any of this is

a) A reflection on the game.
b) A reflection on me.
c) A Good Thing.
d) All of the above, but mainly b).

Suffice it to say that I keep returning to play the game, so it can’t be all bad, but perhaps at some point I should venture out and try to advance the plot of the story, such that mine is a tale that veers slightly more towards the epic and less towards the pornographic.

Reviewlet: Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is a beautiful game, it really does look stunning. It kicks off with a jeep ride from the airport that sets the scene in a similar way to the Half Life tram journey. Lengthy game introductions can be irritating when you’re chafing at the bit to get stuck in, but this one works rather well.

Gameplay-wise, it’s mostly a pretty standard FPS; there’s a nice range of weapons, particularly with the ability to buy and upgrade items, and mix n’ match between your three slots (you can carry a machine pistol, assault rifle and flamethrower, or a grenade launcher, sniper rifle and RPG launcher, or a variety of other hardware). Enemy AI is a peculiar mix; conversationally, it’s very atmospheric. Soldiers chat away to each other appropriately, one particular bit of dialogue that stuck out was after taking out a guard, I was hiding near his body when it was spotted by another guard, who called out to a friend:
“Shit! He killed the new guy.”
“TJ. His name was TJ.”
“Doesn’t matter now, he’s dead.”
Their combat skills, though, aren’t as sharp as their conversation, which is often a good then when there are five or ten of them all after you.

The non-standard FPS side of things is that it doesn’t have a linear plot, it’s aiming more at creating a “world”. I’m not sure it’s entirely succeeded here; things are promising initially, there are two main factions both offering you missions, side-missions from the arms dealer to upgrade your weapons, NPC “buddies”, a fairly large area to roam with hidden diamonds to collect, checkpoints to scout, safe houses to secure. A few hours in, though, it’s a bit same-y. The only people you ever meet are mercenaries and soldiers, who shoot on sight regardless of what you’re doing. No matter how many times you clear a checkpoint, the people manning it have respawned next time you pass through. It’s a pretty static and one-dimensional world, and it makes getting from your briefing to your objective pretty tedious; in something like GTA, at least you could stick the radio on and just cruise around if you wanted to, the vehicles in Far Cry 2 are distinctly lacking in in-car entertainment (though some do have handy machine guns). One of the factions wanted me to take out the Police Chief, which I wasn’t too keen on (didn’t want to destabilise things any more, rather than a sudden attack of conscience), but after doing a mission for the other faction instead, it seemed to be all that was on offer, so perhaps you don’t really have as much choice as it seemed. It’s not bad by any means, I’m still enjoying switching between it and WAR to break things up, but it’s just not quite fulfilling the early potential. I’m only 20% through in Act 1 (whether that’s 20% of Act 1, or 20% of the whole game I’m not sure), hopefully things might pick up a bit in subsequent acts.

Yes! We are all individuals!

Something I haven’t really talked about in WAR is gear. Not the benefits and stats (I haven’t seen enough of how the game pans out at the level cap to decide how the recently announced progressive gear sets will affect things), the important stuff: how it looks.

Both a strong selling point, and something of a limitation, for WAR is the Games Workshop IP. Other settings like Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan don’t really have fixed visual templates for characters; illustrations vary, films might inspire some styles, but need a bit of expansion unless you just have the one class of “barbarian”, all players as Schwarzenegger clones, and only two pieces of armour in the game: “leather posing pouch” and “a couple of leather straps”. In WAR, most of the classes are taken from the tabletop game, with a bit of tinkering to fit an MMO, and that gives you the appearance: a Warrior Priest looks like a Warrior Priest, a Witch Elf looks like a Witch Elf. With the inextricable link of race, class and appearance, your choices can be somewhat limited; if on the Order side you want to be a ranged healer with a bit of DPS, you have to be an Elf; if you want to be an Orc, you have to be a Black Orc, thus a tank, and each class has its own distinctive look (see also “how to recognise Destruction tanks”). Most MMOs have types of armour: light, medium, heavy, cloth, leather, plate, that sort of thing, usually with several classes sharing an armour type. There might be some class specific pieces, or gear with stat bonuses only useful for a particular class, but WAR is a little unusual in that almost everything (cloaks and jewellery apart) is only usable by a single class, reinforcing the distinctive looks from the tabletop game. In other games, a warrior could don some robes for a bit of a laugh, even if only a madman would do so for protection, in WAR there’s no way for a Chosen to dress like a Zealot.

One downside to this is no Hat News Now Today, I’m afraid. As a Bright Wizard, I can’t pop a Witch Hunter’s buckled hat on for a giggle, and the armour in my own head slot isn’t even a hat, it’s a high collar (probably a good thing, wizard’s hats can be a bit daft, and might mess up my mohawk). I suppose I could snap pictures of other people’s hats, but it wouldn’t be the same. Perhaps more widely than just odd people with a hat fetish, it limits roleplaying options a little, there don’t seem to be any casual options for kicking back in your capital city, but then WAR isn’t really a casual kicking-back sort of game.

The distinctiveness across classes does come at the cost of similarities within classes, you don’t have many ways to fundamentally differentiate yourself from others of the same class. As you level up, the gear gets slightly fancier, but the basics don’t really change, you keep that class look as you go; so far, at least, pictures of the high level gear sets look quite reasonable, nothing is ludicrously oversized. This could be a pretty serious issue, character customisation, making yourself stand out is definitely a factor for some MMO players (like me), but WAR treads a fine line; perhaps it’s a bit like the Uncanny Valley, the more similar two characters are, the more you notice the slight differences between them, but you’re not all clones. Again, the inspiration is from the tabletop game, where a unit is comprised of similar, but not identical, figures, which can be painted as desired, painting being reflected in WAR’s dye options. Dyeing seems like such an obvious system, oft-called for in games that don’t have it, but I suspect it’s a bit of a headache for artists and modellers to actually implement well, so it’s definitely nice to have. The painting theme carries into the names of the dyes, taken from Citadel’s paint range. Standard vendors offer a limited selection of dyes, with the more desirable colours (black, the more vivid reds and blues) found as drops from mobs, or possibly crafted by alchemists. These uncommon dyes are fetching high prices at auction on my server at least, emphasising the importance people place on appearance; ideally, I’d really like a wider selection of dyes available cheaply from vendors, but you can see why desirable colours are kept as drops, and the standard selection is enough to at least give yourself a coherent look.

Another way of customising your appearance is through trophies, little medals, emblems and the like that you can hang from your shoulder armour or belt. These are a nice touch; they aren’t terribly obvious, you have to look quite closely to see them, but any customisation options are welcome. I haven’t found too many so far, a fair few look to be linked to tome unlocks, so something to work towards.

Overall, then, WAR does pretty well for character appearances, especially for something soon after release, as new items and gear are nearly always added to games as they go. Certainly compared to Age of Conan, which was terribly bland and generic initially, I believe there are new armour sets being introduced there even as we speak. I’m certainly happy with my Bright Wizard.