The Baldur’s Gate series are Dungeons & Dragons
The Knights of the Old Republic series are Dungeons & Dragons in space with Jedi
Mass Effect is Dungeons & Dragons in space with Jedi without the Jedi
Dragon Age: Origins is Dungeons & Dragons in space with Jedi without the Jedi not in space and without the Dungeons & Dragons license
Yearly Archives: 2009
What shall we use to fill the empty spaces?
Some Twittering about Dragon Age: Origins caught my eye last night:
Shuttler: I doubt I’ll finish DA:O it feels old & environmental limitations just shouldn’t happen anymore.
Zonk: What do you mean by environmental limitations?
Shuttler: not being able to walk in water, swim, freely run down a hill. Invisible barriers, that sort of thing. Hope that makes sense?
The debate flows around many contributors with lots of interesting points and counterpoints within 140 characters, and I was going to chip in on Twitter but it didn’t seem happy about the idea of 1,400 characters, so…
I know where Shuttler’s coming from. For the first hour or two of Dragon Age I kept hitting space, expecting to jump, and getting a bit confused when the game paused. Back in the day (when it was all fields around here) the top-down party-RPG style of the Baldur’s Gate series looked and played quite differently to, say, Tomb Raider. Dragon Age, though, with third person view, right-click mouselook, WASD movement etc. is thematically consistent with many MMOGs, Grand Theft Auto III and IV, Mass Effect etc, so when I’m running around I expect to vault effortlessly into the air with a tap of the space key. It’s really more like Baldur’s Gate in gameplay, though, and it took a little while to get back into the groove of zooming out for a more tactical view, click-to-move as well as WASD, pausing to order the party around in combat etc., stuff that was second nature before I got ensconced in MMOGs.
It’s not the jumping in itself, that’s a symptom, like the swimming that Shuttler mentioned; Dragon Age wouldn’t be magically improved with a wider range of athletic activities, it’s just a little jarring the first time you stop dead at the edge of a lake rather than diving into it and merrily doggy paddling (which seldom makes sense when you’re wearing a couple of tonnes of cast iron, but still), or you’re stymied by a fallen tree that doesn’t look particularly difficult to scramble over or under. Having adjusted, it’s really not a problem now. I can see where fans of open worlds could find it restrictive, but for me it’s getting to the point; the Korcari Wilds could have been ten times bigger and allowed you to explore every inch of them, but with the same amount of content in there it would just mean a lot more, rather boring, running around. They could box everything in, sending you to dungeons all the time so the barriers are far more concrete (either figuratively or literally), but unless roleplaying an agoraphobe that might get a bit repetitive, so I’ll take the invisible walls. Gives a great opportunity for Marcel Marceau impressions too: next, walking against the wind…
Town to keep me movin’, keep me groovin’ with some energy.
Our valiant heroes hung the head of the troll on the wall of the kinship house and stood back to admire it.
“It looks as though the troll has crashed his head through the wall of our house” mused Van Hemlock.
“Ha ha! His body is probably in the air on the other side of the wall with his legs flailing around!” cried Teppo.
“This really has been a most splendid evening; this is what MMOs should be all about” I thought.
Over the Mumble channel I simply guffawed.
But what events had led up to this joyous conclusion to an evening’s gaming? Prepare to be astounded as, with a budget of a paltry half a million pounds and the power of ultimate blogging technology, I create for you an illusion of traversing time and space so real that Hollywood directors could only dream of such powerful mind altering effects.
[Four hours earlier…]
Observe how the bold font really makes you feel as though you’re actually there. Half a million pounds well spent, even if I do say so myself.
With a regular member of the Hobbington Crescent Massive away on holiday, and what with the trials and tribulations of last week, the general consensus was that it wouldn’t hurt to have a week off from saving Middle Earth from itself, because let’s face it, the Ring Bearer hardly seems to be in a hurry to get his pie-eating hobbit arse to Mordor any time soon anyway.
For those of you who may now be picturing the image of a hobbit bottom that munches on pastry-based foodstuffs, I apologise, it wasn’t what I had in mind, but once it was in my mind I felt compelled not to reword it, deciding instead to make you suffer the image as well.
The aforementioned Van Hemlock and myself, however, are gluttons for punishment or so it seems, as we both logged in to the game to see if anyone else was about, perhaps from a sense of duty, or perhaps because we wanted to make sure that we could, in fact, actually log back in after the trauma of the previous week. Either way, there we both were, and so we decided to have an adventure, the only requirement being that we attempted to avoid gaining XP as much as possible since we didn’t want to dramatically out-level the dearly absent members of our good kinship.
And so we cogitated over what activities we could undertake in the game, and inevitably our eyes drifted to our quest logs, and that’s when it happened:
“Y’know, the next part of Book 11 is in Goblin Town, it’s marked as suitable for a small fellowship and is also low level to us now. We could do that.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“We wouldn’t earn much XP, and I’ve been down to Goblin Town at a lower level than we are now and managed a large chunk of it solo, so we should be fine even without a healer.”
“Oh, God, we’re mad. We’re utterly mad, or masochists or something.”
“All of the above. If nothing else we’ve got to run all the way across from Rivendell to Goblin Town, so it’ll feel like a real Book for a while, until we get there and start, y’know, actually killing stuff.”
[laughing] “Let’s do it.”
“Let’s!”
Without further ado we made our way to Goblin Town and started killing the low level non-elite mobs there and found, much to our surprise, that these mobs dropped the quest items that we were seeking, and in the space of time that it takes a furious hobbit to swing a large two-handed hammer and a dwarf, with beard bristling, to swing a couple of axes around about his person, we had completed the quest.
It was somewhat of an anti-climax.
So we decided to continue on until we, uh, climaxed. Honestly, it wasn’t like that, just a hobbit and a dwarf out on a platonic date to slaughter all the orc-kind that they could find. So slaughter we did, and then twice around the block for another damn good slaughtering, and after the rambling adventure of running a half-marathon across Evendim last week, our latest self-assigned quest – to slaughter everything in Goblin Town that so much as moved – felt really rather refreshing. We slaughtered goblins, and we slaughtered orcs. We slaughtered wargs and their keepers. We pretended that the corpses of mobs had moved and slaughtered them again just to be sure. We slaughtered rocks and chests, camp fires and the darkness. We nearly slaughtered one another on several occasions. We laughed at that, and then slaughtered the echoes of our laughter as it reverberated around the empty cavernous scene of that which we had slaughtered.
It was pretty cathartic.
I posted to Twitter about the delights we were experiencing as The Smallest Fellowship, as we now dubbed ourselves, and shortly thereafter we were joined by a third. With Teppo’s Runekeeper at our backs the slaughtering process continued apace as we took down the Goblin King with ease and then proceeded to molest the troll-come-rancor-wannabe that lives in the pit in the Goblin King’s throne room. And I do mean molest. As the troll bellowed at our stalwart hobbit Guardian for the umpteenth time, our Runekeeper cried “jab your stick in his mouth” which, if it weren’t innuendo-laden enough, we promptly and entirely accidentally followed-up with a fellowship manoeuvre called “Three Pronged Attack”. Suffice it to say that the troll was not equipped to withstand this coordinated gang-bang: the Guardian shoving his stick in the creature’s mouth, the dwarf thrusting away with his purple weapon from behind as always, and the Runekeeper shooting his ‘white lightning’ at the troll’s face from all the way across the room; Runekeepers are such show-offs, and although I was tempted to dub our elven companion the Mirkwood Moneyshot, I decided against it.
After pretty much porning the poor troll into submission, we continued on down into the depths of Thundergrot where lesser trolls still provided a pleasantly invigorating and chaotic challenge as we over-pulled and subsequently attracted some re-spawns in what one can only describe as an AoE orgy; it looked unlikely that we would prevail. Actually, it looked like nothing more than a steaming great mound of angry trolls with a trio of barely observable smaller folk wriggling beneath it, but after a few well timed lengthy cool-downs were blown, we came through with our skins, as it were.
At some point along the way one of the trolls was kind enough to provide a suitable trophy head, which was tucked away in the hobbit’s really quite expansive backpack. It was later taken to a taxidermist in Bree who, improbably enough, was experienced with stuffing and mounting troll heads. He was particularly skilled I thought, as he chose the replacement eyes with such skill and care as to accurately represent the troll’s wide-eyed look of shock as it was unexpectedly taken by a three pronged attack.
Having sated our slaughtering needs we then headed back home to sell and repair, before journeying down to Echad Mirobel in Eregion for stage two of our evening’s entertainment, where the School at Tham Mirdain – which we had attempted to run as duos for fun a few weeks earlier – was awaiting our return.
This time though, there was a trio of us in the traditional tank/DPS/healer formation, against the forty or so Uruk-hai and Men of Dunland who currently held the school.
Three of us? Forty of them?
I make that Three Prong O’Clock.
Thought for the day.
The scary thing isn’t that Blizzard have opened a micro-transaction store for World of Warcraft; one should consider that event to be as the emotive theme tune is to the shark in Jaws, or a dissonant violin crescendo is to Jason Voorhees.
It’s a warning, but not a guarantee, of the actual horror waiting to strike.
The audience sits gripping the arms of their chairs and each other, or peering through fingers, all the while willing in vain that the innocent band of plucky wallets and purses turn back from the strange path that they are following lest they are caught by the monster that stalks them and have their innards sucked out.
Everyone holds their breath. And waits…
When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.
“Well you could do that, but nobody will want to group with you.” A phrase wrapped in wilful condescension so thick that if you spread some patronization between a couple of slices of it you’d have the world’s most bitter doorstop sandwich. Welcome to DDO’s General chat channel, a land where the nose evolved only as an extension of the face to be looked down, and the horses are so very high. I try to picture meeting some of the more vocal personages who frequent this place and I can only really come up with a sort of hybrid creature formed from the unnatural union of Medusa and Charybdis – giant mouths that spit a whirling torrent of venomous snakes.
Let’s face it, DDO is hardly unique in having chat channels filled with bilious supremacist outpourings; whether it concerns how to spec. a character, how to make gold, or any other number of arbitrary numeral demarcations, where the supremacist can put data into a spreadsheet and show categorically that they are better than those who don’t do it their way, that they do 0.1% more DPS, that they make 5% more gold per hour, every MMO has their class of players who think that they are above and beyond the plebeians who don’t play the game the way that they do.
It’s just that DDO has had thirty five or so years and four editions of the pen and paper game to really hone their hive of supercilious bees, who swarm out and attack with stinging words anything that doesn’t belong to their colony. People who commit the heinous cardinal sin of attempting to multiclass a healer, for example.
Turbine have created templates for classes in DDO, initially I viewed these as a sensible aid to new players unfamiliar with the game’s D20 hybrid rule set, to prevent them creating a properly broken character while they get to grips with the game. What I then suspected was that these templates were actually an attempt to give new players at least a modicum of a sane character build in order to prevent DDO’s most special community members from driving away these potential customers, such that the new players would merely be looked down upon as pitiable peasants by the DDO Maxminati. My current theory, however, is that the templates actually act as a warning, they say “Look, even these templates, created by the developers of the game, are open to scorn and derision by our community. And don’t even bother to see what the forum dwellers think of them, lest you have to poke out your own eyes to stop the searing spite of their words from branding itself on your mind.” and so new players realise in short order that the prejudice, dullness, and spite is not directed solely at them, but at all beings who don’t fit with the supremacist’s ideals.
So, another MMO, another General channel quickly partitioned off into its own tab titled “Wrath”, along with the Trade channel under “Greed” and the LFG channel under “Sloth”. And yet people still ponder on the ‘mystery’ of the prevalence of the soloer in MMOs.
I do wonder if the community of Darkfall is any better; my natural instinct tells me that it would be at least as bad – it seems that only rarely can you have an MMO and not have a general community full of hate and spite, for they are formed of humans, and this is what humans do better than any other creature on Earth – yet there is the glimmer of hope in me that some level of formal politeness exists in a game where anyone you offend can join with his friends to hunt you down and put an axe through your skull.
It goes without saying that I’ve now created my experimental Cleric in DDO: with maxed Intellect and using Wisdom as the dump stat, they are armed with a crossbow and have the very best in the Search, Pick Lock and Disarm Trap cross-class skills. The experiment is not as to whether the character will work, but whether it is repellent enough to DDO’s master race to act much as a holy symbol acts upon a vampire; my theory is that I will hold up this symbol of singular silliness before them and they will shrink away at the horror that it represents and, if they fail their Will save, burst into flames and be purged.
The Good, The Bad and The Lampshade
God I’m sick of Dragon Age: Origins, splashed all over every blog, games site and forum like arterial spray, the last thing the world needs is some “first impressions” type rubbish. So… sorry, but I’ve been caught in The Event as well.
The Good
It’s bloody good. Duh, etc. I was trying for feigned indifference for a while, or even deliberate contrariness with the sheer amount of coverage it’s getting, but (from the first few hours, which were going to be a few minutes just creating a quick character), yes, it’s good.
The Bad
I’m sure nobody wants to wade through yet another gushing review, and frankly it’s more fun to rant anyway; none of this stuff is exactly “bad” per se, it doesn’t significantly detract from the good-ness of the game, but it was such an easy post title.
Microtransactions/DLC: without delving into the whole question of whether launch day DLC is a way of draining some extra cash from players for features that should’ve shipped with the game anyway, or a viable, entirely optional, way of companies making more money to plough into game development, I saw The Warden’s Keep involved “extra storage” so had no option but to go and buy it straight away. Which involved having to buy some Bioware Points. Now I can understand Nintendo/Microsoft/Turbine Points when there’s a whole array of stuff to buy (obfuscate actual cash cost of items, allow the company to vary exchange rates and offers, force you to buy odd quantities of points so you have some left over giving an incentive to top up and buy more stuff, etc etc), so I guess this is just the start of a big old Bioware Store that might make more sense, but at the moment, unless I’m more vastly mistaken than a man who thinks Hillaire Belloc is still alive, there’s precisely one thing to buy: The Warden’s Keep, for 560 Bioware points (there’s also The Stone Prisoner, but with a code for that in every box it’s really just a way of getting some money out of second hand game sales). So from the game you have to go off into a web browser, and get asked “How many Bioware points would you like?”, and you tick the “For what possible reason would I want any quantity other than 560?” option (at least 560 was an option, rather than them only being sold in multiples of 600 or something), buy the points, go back to the game, refresh your Points Balance, exchange those points for DLC, and then you can download the stuff. Like I say, makes sense as part of a move to a Bioware or EA-wide ecosystem, seems rather pointless at the moment (I thought Steam was a waste of space when it was just a delivery method for Half Life 2, look at it now…)
Blood, blood, glorious blood: if you hadn’t guessed from the blood-splattered logos, splash (in a very literal sense) screens etc., there’s a bit of blood in the game. An attempt to convey the visceral and brutal nature of melee combat in a genre that tends to a romantic and sterilised view of a dagger in the guts? The result of watching Flesh for Frankenstein a bit too much (lord knows what Dragon Age would look like in 3D)? Either way up, combat itself is satisfyingly bloody (I think I saw a beheading at one point, but was zoomed out in a tactical view and going after a caster at the time so I’m not entirely sure), but the game tries to carry this over post-combat, making it very obvious in cut scenes. After the very first fight with some rats in a pantry my character picked one up, rubbed it all over his face, flung its internal organs at his companions, filled a small paddling pool with viscera and rolled around in it, visited The Big Red Ink Factory That Makes Red Ink where an unfortunate incident caused one of the machines to malfunction, spraying all and sundry with red ink, and was on his way back to the adventure when somehow a Karo Syrup tanker driven by Bruce Campbell collided with a Red Food Colouring tanker driven by Sam Raimi, engulfing him in a tide of yet more red gloop. Then he wandered out of the pantry and had a bit of a chat with the cook, who was entirely unperturbed by the blood he was dripping across the floor, and slightly shocked when I revealed there’d been rats in the pantry. Mind you, the shower and dry cleaning facilities in Dragon Age are absolutely top notch, as within the space of a couple of minutes he and the team were absolutely spotless again. I dunno, I mean I’m all for making things a bit more brutal than “oh prithee I am stabbed, farewell cruel world, I die!”, but it’s just trying too hard really. It’s somewhat less jarring when you’ve been involved in a lengthy series of tough battles, but even so the whole “Blood splattered! Clean! Blood splattered! Clean!” switch needs a bit more work. There’s probably a bunch of options to control this stuff, I should go in and check it out, but was too engrossed in the adventure at the time. In fact, if the character creator’s anything to go by, there are probably sliders for “Blood Quantity”, “Spurt Distance” (ooh err missus), “Plasma Viscosity” etc.
The Lampshade
One line of dialogue did stand out just a smidge. After the aforementioned first battle with some rats (possibly ten of them, I wasn’t counting), your companion sticks a lampshade on his head, waves a red flag and shouts “Hey, that was just like the start of some tale of adventure IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN WINK WINK METATEXTUAL IRONY EH EH?”
All right, that’s paraphrasing slightly and on another day I might’ve seen it as a charming knowing wink, but they’d actually woven the “kill ten rats” trope into the introduction quite nicely so I hadn’t even thought of it before Captain Lampshade shone the spotlight. Though maybe that was just me being dense.
Wallet death by a thousand microcuts.
Not all microtransactions are created equal.
Turbine have seen the light with DDO: a large proportion of the items that you can buy in the store you can also earn through playing the game; from basic +1 Items of Slight Betterness to the sigils that allow you to continue past each of the limit caps at levels four, eight, etc. You can earn all of these items through playing the free game. The things that they generally hold back on are the adventure packs, classes/races and those items which make you level up faster; these are held back for obvious reasons, although even these can be earnt through playing the game and earning favour which can be converted in to store points.
How is Blizzard approaching the issue at the moment? So far they have a small store, with a couple of pet vanity items which – after mounts – are some of the most sought after fluff items in the game. Except on RP servers, where it’s usually a dress that makes your character’s boobs hang out and leaves little imagination in the buttock region either. And that’s just the male characters.
The important difference for me is that there’s no way to earn the WoW vanity pets in the game, and I think that’s a mistake when your game also requires a monthly subscription to play. Blizzard seems to have swung entirely to the other end of the scale with their pet store, catering to the More Money Than Time folks, and ignoring those who are of the More Time Than Money variety. This seems especially silly when Blizzard could make a nice grind for the vanity pet items and keep people invested in their game, both in terms of time and money, while offering those who baulk at the real world price of these trivial vanity items a chance to afford them in their own way, which, given the cost of a monthly fee, would work out about the same if you made the grind a daily affair that lasted a month.
Of course at the moment Blizzard offers these pets only as an additional cost to the game and, knowing the WoW community, that will probably cause a lot of ill will, probably more than it really warrants, but I think Blizzard are indeed being greedy and foolish with their first foray into a forthright game store.
SoE are looking to create a subscription for Free Realms, presumably because they aren’t getting the returns that they were hoping for from the game store, but again some of their better vanity items require you to pay or go without; it’s surprising how many people will baulk at paying for something when they are forced to, yet pay exactly the same price, for exactly the same item, if they have the option to earn it in the game, but can take a shortcut by paying for it now.
With DDO, Turbine have mastered the psychology of microtransactions; others would do well to learn from them.
Blizzard’s pet theory on microtransactions.
[To the tune of Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl]
This was never the way I planned, not my intention.
I got so brave, drink in hand, lost my discretion.
It’s not what I’m used to, just wanna try this ‘con’.
I’m curious it’s true, caught my attention.I bought a pet and I liked it,
The waste of my would-be paycheck.
I bought a pet just to try it,
I hope my guild mates don’t mind it.
It felt so wrong,
It felt so right,
It don’t mean I’d buy more tonight.
I bought a pet and I liked it,
I liked it.
What can I say? They went for my Pandaren weak spot and scored a critical hit.
Thought for the day.
Massively has an article describing how Funcom has a new MMO in development, Board with the World, a free-to-play social MMO focusing on the world of extreme sports. I’m not entirely sure that a pun on ‘bored’ is the optimum way to market your MMO product. And then, of course, there’s:
First and foremost we will be focusing on snowboarding, with the possibility of adding different sports later.
So, starting off with the extreme sport well known for its grinds, then.
Reviewlets: Stewart Lee and Boffoonery
A quick comedy catch up: saw Stewart Lee a couple of weeks back, on his “If you prefer a milder comedian please ask for one” tour. Opener Henning Wehn, the German Comedy Ambassador to the UK, was pretty good, and Lee himself was fantastic. Covering the heinous crime of coffee shop loyalty card stamp faking, the joy of moving to the country or indeed another country for the quality of life (particularly with respect to prawns) and his admiration and respect for the Top Gear team, the high point was the finale, a brilliantly crafted, slowly building epic, beginning in a doctor’s surgery before moving into pear cider, the magpie culture of advertisers and the internet, and finishing with a song. Yup, a song.
Last night was Boffoonery at the Bloomsbury Theatre, a comedy benefit for Bletchley Park. Both informative, with Simon Singh doing a bit on the bible “code” before giving a live demonstration of an Enigma machine in action, and entertaining, with stand up from Robin Ince, Dave Gorman and Richard Herring and skits, spoofs and humorous vignettes from Punt & Dennis, Laurence & Gus, John Finnemore, Margaret Cabourn-Smith and the voice of Stephen Fry. All most excellent, but particularly most excellent was Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party, a Bletchley-themed panel game chaired by Robert Llewelyn featuring Maggie Philbin and Richard Herring against Johnny Ball and Robin Ince. Ince deployed fearsome, if ultimately futile, lateral thinking that put even Ted Rogers on 3-2-1 to shame, Herring dropped in deft asides, Maggie Philbin, having read up on the subject, actually knew the answers to the questions in great detail, and Johnny Ball is a legend. At the age of 71 he’s as full of passion and enthusiasm as ever, with that vital hint of lunacy, as several questions fortuitously allowed him to launch into a whistle stop tour of binary and Egyptian multiplication, Euler and the seven bridges of Koenigsberg and finding square roots with Euclidean geometry, demonstrated with a string of beads that have hopefully given Richard Herring another half hour of material.