Monthly Archives: February 2010

Rocked Off

Dear Technology Sites (and the rest of the world),

“Rocking” is not a synonym of “featuring”, “running”, “including”, “wearing”, “demonstrating”, “eating” or whatever other sodbuggering verb, noun or adjective you’ve randomly decided to replace today.

“We’re totally rocking updates from the Mobile World Conference today where the latest Nokias are rocking a new operating system, HTC have unveiled a handset rocking a 3.7″ screen, I’m rocking a cool t-shirt and I’m going to rock a sandwich for lunch then rock a taxi to rock to the hotel to rhythmically move backwards and forwards myself to sleep.”

Sickness comes on horseback, but goes away on foot.

I spent the weekend being raided by what seemed like several hundred different virus pick-up groups, as though it was patch weekend in the virus world and I was the new dungeon content. None of them managed to defeat me, I’m happy to report, although one group did get me to about ten percent on Saturday night before my enrage timer kicked in and I dropped a couple of Paracetamol into their midst. The vanquished viruses struggled valiantly on, but once they were flushed out of my nose and the Tissue of Infinite Absorption came into view, they quickly resigned themselves to the inevitable wipe.

In between alternating sips of hot Lemsip and adding more white boulders to the tissue barricade that I was slowly erecting between myself and the rest of the world, I spent a little bit of time running a new character around in Lord of the Rings Online as a bit of an easy and mindless diversion from the interminable attempts at raid progression that were going on within my own body. Turbine really are working wonders on the starter areas of the game, they’ve gone back to several of the early zones now and have tweaked things to make the levelling progress swifter and less painful than it was when the game first launched. There are horse taxi ranks at various halfway points between major quest hubs where before the player had to slowly jog back and forth between said hubs and the objective of the quests found there, which invariably required you to be exactly as far away from any travel route as was computationally possible; now you can grab a handful of quests and then hop on a horse to somewhere that is, if not precisely where you need to be, then somewhere within the same geographical region.

Progression through the Lone Lands has been smoothed out as well, where before there were quests that sent you from one end of the zone to the other and back again, many of which required a fellowship, the progress through the zone is now a gentle wave of predominantly soloable progression running west to east, from the Forsaken Inn on to the new camp near Minas Eriol, via the still central focal point of Ost Guruth, then further east to Dol Vaeg which deals with the undead at Nan Dhelu, and also the Earthkin camp to the south, which sends you further south still, to visit the trolls of Harloeg. And for those who keep their eyes open there’s also a small contingent of dwarves who are having trouble with an excavation they are undertaking, located somewhere between Minos Eriol and Ost Guruth.

Although the Lone Lands is still a fairly drab place to adventure, with wide featureless rolling plains sparsely dotted with the odd ruin, albeit punctuated impressively by the looming imperious presence of Weathertop, with its stone watchtower crown, the actual quest experience is now vastly improved, the player finds themselves having to tread over old ground far less often than before, which helps to alleviate some of the previous frustration resulting from the feeling that one has seen it all before, and can we please move the tour bus of Middle Earth on to the next point of interest please?

So I’d like to give Turbine the KiaSA Hearty Pat On The Back In A Tentative-Yet-Manly ‘Jolly Good Show!’ Fashion To Show That We’re Not Coming On To You Or Anything, Just Trying To Express Our Appreciation Of Your Efforts award for service to new MMO players and alts. They’ll hopefully be pleased with it because it’s a bloody great big trophy, as it needs to be to fit that title on the plaque around its base. I didn’t win KiaSA’s Most Likely To Make Up A Spurious Award With A Title That Is Far Longer Than Really Necessary And Thus Causing All Sorts Of Trouble When Trying To Find A Trophy Large Enough To Fit The Title On The Plaque At Its Base award for three years running for nothing, you know.

Right, time to go and wipe some more raids, it might just be my imagination, but I’m sure I can see the tiny viral NPC vendors rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of more repair bills.

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

One of the things that I like about Lord of the Rings Online is that, in order to claim at least some sort of adherence to the spirit of Tolkien’s mighty work, they needed to keep the game’s armour and weapons towards the more subdued end of the General Garishness Scale as we can see in Figure A.

Figure A - General Garishness Scale

Figure A - General Garishness Scale

Dragon Age: Origins on the other hand is hard to place on the scale because it has, on the whole, a fairly sombre design philosophy with regards to armour and weapons, but has the occasional Warcraftian eyesore whose effect is only magnified by the fact that it keeps such sober company. Take the longsword version of Starfang, one of the better swords in the game, which appears to have been designed by the car stylists from The Fast and the Furious. With its vivacious eggshell blue neon glow from hilt to tip, I think it’s safe to say that it stands out against the more traditional steel on offer, but not in a good way to my mind; it has what I can only describe as veins of glowing neon blue running the length of its blade and it does seem to resemble a giant blue penis in sword form, as though Dr Manhattan had detached his wang and altered its molecular structure in order that you could beat Darkspawn to death with it. Now there’s a fanfic crossover idea.

I suppose that swords in these fantasy games are a bit like lady’s pleasure devices: most want a subtle, discreet unit that doesn’t draw attention to themselves and can be slipped in and out of a body without any more fuss than a modest breathless gasp on the part of the recipient; other people, and I’m not entirely sure that they aren’t either mythical or the sole preserve of fans of adult entertainment films, want a humungous intimidating thing, that glows and sparkles and which could have someone’s eye out from over six feet away, the primary design goal of which seems to be to scare the living crap out of pet cats sneaking around under the bed, or a partner who accidentally stumbles upon it whilst looking for their slippers there.

I don’t really understand the whole ‘the bigger the better’ and ‘if it glows it must be special’ idea behind items in these games, I’m sure the heritage of it lies in fantasy literature and Dungeons & Dragons, and it has since evolved as a cheap and easy way to allow players to quickly identify those with the biggest eRogenous Zone from some distance – half a continent away in the case of World of Warcraft – but all the neon and flashing lights and ridiculously inflated proportions seem tacky and uncivilised to my mind, doubly so when it appears in otherwise sober games like Dragon Age: Origins or Lord of the Rings Online where the starkness of contrast is at its most pronounced, like finding a Constable watercolour titled 37DDs Outside Las Vegas Casino.

KiaSA Top Tips.

MMO raiders, stave off boredom whilst on holiday by picking a fast food outlet at random from the local directory and then attempting to drive there without using the brakes on your car. Learning all the traffic light sequences along the way in order not to have to slow down will simulate the complex knowledge required for end game raiding, and pedestrians crossing the road in front of you can be equated to trash mobs trying to stop you from getting to the boss.

Once you’ve managed to get to there a few times without braking, or have had enough of the fatty loot at the end, simply pick a slightly upmarket restaurant and start all over again for higher rewards!

Yours repetitively,

Stu Pidraid

Rejected side quests in Mass Effect 2

As Melmoth rather splendidly points out Bioware games do have a bit of a formula, a key part of which is getting to know the other members of your party by chatting with them, discovering unfinished business in their past and helping them out on some form of quest. When Bioware are on form with characters, story and voice acting these can be amongst the most engaging parts of the games, forging bonds with your comrades beyond the fact that they’ve got Shield Block Level 4 to handle an alpha-strike and helping to establish popular characters like HK-47 and Minsc (and Boo, of course).

It’s a short hop from formula to formulaic, though, and Mass Effect 2 does tend to emphasise the latter a bit. If you had three or four companions it might not be so noticeable, but running through the same set of actions ten times in a row rather drives it home; crew member has something on their mind (if you don’t pick up the subtle signals like them appearing distracted in conversation then your Yeoman will shout at you every time you pass: “hey Captain, someone wants to see you!”), have a bit of a chat to find out that their brother/sister/mother/father/son/daughter is in some sort of trouble, fly to a planet/space station, have a bit of a chat to a few people with some connection to your party member, shoot a bunch of bad people, get to the big finish where your party member is pointing a gun at someone, right click the blue option to grab the gun off them and say “you don’t want to do this”, home for tea, cake and Paragon points.

It could’ve been worse, though; entirely fictitious leaked documents that we’ve just invented reveal Mass Effect 2 originally had no less than 25 recruitable characters, and they were starting to run out of ideas for new and interesting side quests with some of them:

Eliza, a biotic freelancer: “Shepard, I’ve just got word from my brother Jeff; he and his wife live on the frontier worlds, they went out shopping leaving their children with the nanny, and while they were out there was a planetary alert warning of Batarian slaveships.  On returning home the children were nowhere to be seen, and they couldn’t get hold of the nanny.”

   That’s terrible, we must get after the Batarians, there’s not a moment to lose!
 /
O
 \
   I’m sorry Eliza but the fate of humanity is at stake, we can’t dick around looking for a couple of kids.

Eliza: “Oh, no, they’re fine, turned out they’d gone to the zoo and the nanny hadn’t charged her mobile comm unit so the battery was dead. Anyway, my brother and his wife had bought a load of furniture while shopping and it’s all flat-pack; they had a go at putting it together but silly old Jeff, he’s all fingers and thumbs and almost nailed himself to the coffee table when putting it together, so could we pop around and help them finish it off?”

Sharmura, the Asari Commando: “Shepard! I am so sorry to disturb you, but I do not know who else to turn to. You have already done so much for me, but I must ask for a favour. It is my… I am not sure how you humans would describe the relationship, but somebody I met while on holiday and exchanged addresses with and we send each other a postcard now and again. They are facing one of the ultimate rites of Asari culture.”

   We must go and help them at once!
 /
O
 \
   Yeah, whatever.

Sharmura: “Thank you, Shepard, I knew I could rely on you. The ritual is difficult to describe, but… do you humans have what we would know as Cornflakes? They are like flakes, made of corn; served with milk they are a breakfast delicacy, or sometimes even as an evening meal when you can’t really be bothered to cook and you’ve run out of Pot Noodles. My friend had a bowl of them, and forgot to rinse it out straight after finishing as the ancient texts decree, and now faces the Rite of Brillopad to cleanse her crockery. I was thinking we could pop along with the M920 nuke launcher, that should do the trick.

Abel, an ex-Alliance soldier turned Mercenary: “Hey Shepard! Y’know how, like, I don’t talk about my family much? Well I just got this message from Uncle Geoff, he’s the guy who got me into the Alliance in the first place, I really looked up to him as a kid, he’d let me dress up in his tac pads and stuff. Well it’s bad news; see, his patrol got caught in a duststorm on one of the dark zone planets, took out comms, their support ship had to pull out ‘cos of heavy Geth presence, Uncle Geoff caught a slug in the knee and can’t walk.”

   Don’t worry, we’ll pull him out and make those Geth sorry!
 /
O
 \
   I haven’t got enough Renegade points so I’m going to be pointlessly insulting.

Abel: “Huh? Oh, no, this was last year, the patrol holed up until the storm cleared and the Alliance came back in force. No, he’s fine now, well, apart from the knee, even with reconstruction he was invalided out of the military. He used the pension to set up as a handyman, though, and he needs some business cards and a few fliers. He got a quote from a local printer for 79 Euro, and I was all “Whoah, total rip-off, I could pick up the blank cards and stuff and do them for 20 Euro tops”, so can I use the Normandy’s colour laser printer? We’ll put 10 Euro through to cover the costs of the paper and stuff, split the other ten between us, whaddya say?”

I can believe anything provided it is incredible.

So that was the weekend that was; that is to say, that was the weekend that was when I finished Mass Effect 2. I’m left feeling slightly more empty than I was when I finished Dragon Age: Origins, I think it’s probably as much to do with the fact that I took time to complete everything I could in Mass Effect 2 and therefore have no desire to go back through it, even if there is the option to play as a renegade rather than a paragon. Let’s face it though, there’s no real difference between the two at the end of the day: in the paragon version of events you would verbally persuade a guard that it would be better for their family and friends if they let you through the door, and they would thank you for the advice and let you go on your way, whereas in the renegade version you explain things via the arcane diplomatic art of fracturing their skull against a door frame, and they thank you for the advice through the remaining half of their jaw, and let you go on your way.

Both Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 follow Bioware’s now standard technique for telling a big story with various branches: hero exists; hero is tasked with saving the country/planet/universe; hero goes around recruiting a formidable group of allies through various location-based missions; hero finds out that all of the people they have recruited are wet-blanket children who can’t solve personal problems on their own; hero runs around several other locations solving the teenage angst of their companions; hero runs around a bit more to make sure they’ve done any plot-inconsequential side missions that might award some sexy looking armour or weapons; hero goes to obvious location of Final Battle; hero defeats inevitable Big Bad; some party members leave/die depending on a few arbitrary decisions that sometimes make sense, sometimes not. The End.

As far as it goes it works, and works well enough, because they’ve had several generations of games to iterate through and perfect the system, but once you’ve played through a few, Bioware’s games do seem a bit like RPG Trivial Pursuit: fill up your little party-wheel with coloured wedges of heroes, and once you have a full set, head in to the middle of the board to answer the final boss question, which is always either about dragons or giant robots depending on whether you picked the Fantasy or Sci-Fi category.

So the game design is fairly formulaic within the little genre that Bioware have created, which, in a fit of inspired originality, we shall call Bioware RPGs, but also the game play often has obvious flaws or bugs in it.

In Dragon Age: Origins my rogue character kept heading into melee every battle, even though I had their preset tactics set up for archery, because I’d picked a selection of archer talents. I didn’t want to have to micro-manage them every fight, like some sort of errant three-year-old child who happens to like stabbing people to death with daggers.

“No dear, I’ve told you before, use your bow to kill the bad men or you won’t get any pudding tonight. Oh now, there’s no point in rolling around on the floor like that, it’s not going to change anything. No, banging your head on the chest of loot won’t work either. And stabbing the cat is right out! Go to your room young lady and think about what you’ve done!”

So I bit the bullet and went into the tactics menu and set a bunch of options, I can’t remember what, precisely, but essentially the plan was to force them in any situation to get their bow out and shoot from range. I don’t know quite how I managed it, but what I ended up with on the first fight was a rogue who stood on the edge of the battle and just constantly swapped between their daggers and their bow, unsheathing one, only to put it a way and draw the other. It’s like my rogue was having some sort of authority crisis, or they had suddenly turned from a tempestuous toddler into a sullen teenager who was going to do exactly what I asked in just such a way that meant they weren’t doing what I intended, before stamping up the stairs to their room and sulking to the sounds of Ben Folds Five or Jimmy Eat World. So I did the thing that any parent would do given the chance, I took them gently to one side, made thoughtful meaningful eye contact, and carefully smacked them upside the head. Then took the dog with me instead.

In Mass Effect 2 I had a similar problem, but this time I was Bugs Bunny and I had Daffy Duck on my team. There are various ammo abilities in the game that, as a soldier, I could level-up to add extra effects, my favourite being the Cryo ammo which had a chance to nullify enemies by encasing them in ice, and if you got a lucky shot, you could then shatter them into a million satisfying pieces, essentially getting a kill for far less ammo than you might otherwise have had to expend. At its maximum rank you can choose to have this ability freeze more often, or instead have it apply to every member of your group; since it already froze enemies on a pretty regular basis, I went for the latter option with the thinking that more people using it would mean more frozen enemies, and indeed that worked wonderfully. The issue came when I was forced to take Jacob along with me for his side mission. I hadn’t used him much on away missions as I didn’t really care too much about him, primarily stemming from the fact that every conversation option about Getting Jiggy With It led to him being all coy and bashful and… YEAH, RIGHT, have you seen my sexy female butt in this officer’s outfit? I’m offering it to you, no questions asked, and you want to talk about it later because you’re unsure? Fine, I’m following Tamarind’s advice and going gay for Garrus instead. Look, I’ve had a placard made up and everything; we’re doing a march around Citadel next Sunday: Garrus Pride.

Anyway.

Not really caring in the slightest for little miss prude pants over there, I hit his auto-level-up button. Which was a mistake, I admit. It turns out that he gets an ammo boosting ability too, one that sets people on fire; a flaming enemy is useful enough, but having both ammo types myself I found the soft control provided by the Cryo ammo to be a far better option. He also, as it happens, had taken the Give This Effect To All Group Members ability. Now, it turns out that you can only have one of the group ammo abilities apply at a time, so you can probably see where this is going. Of course I hadn’t realised that he had this ability, I had just punched the Yeah Whatever level-up option, and got on with the mission. It was shortly after the first fight that I began to wonder why the enemy forces were suffering a large number of flame-based deaths when I had my Cryo ammo set — I was reasonably certain that Flamey Death and Freezey Death were at opposite ends of the F’ing Death spectrum. I checked my gun and, sure enough, I had Inferno ammo set. Curious, never mind, I’ll set Cryo ammo and away we go! Freezey Death. Freezey Death. Freezey Death. Fiery Death. F… wait, what? And so it would continue: Set Cryo ammo; enter combat; Freezey Death; Freezey Death; Fiery Death; Swear Loudly.

It didn’t take me too long to realise what was going on, and that there was no obvious way to tell him to turn off his Inferno ammo. I did a quick search on a few forums and all I turned up was a bunch of, y’know, Forum People (imagine that phrase whispered, with that haunted look in one’s eyes, in a tone of voice reserved for use when talking about the criminally insane. Or Right To Roam advocates). The next combat I entered I waited until he had activated his Inferno ammo, overwriting my previously active Cryo ammo, then went in and switched the power off in his power selection bar. Turning my Cryo ammo back on I carried smugly on with the fight. Freezey Death. Freezy Death. Fiery Death. F’ing Death to you Jacob, you git!

I wouldn’t be beaten though, oh no.

It was at this point that we got into the aforementioned Bugs Bunny versus Daffy Duck battle of wills, as I resolved to pretty much ignore combat and concentrate on turning on my Cryo ammo whenever I saw Jacob turn on his Inferno ammo.

“Cryo season”

“Inferno season”

“Cryo season!”

“Inferno season!”

“Cryo season!”

“Inferno season!”

“Inferno season!”

“Ok, good, glad you agree”

“Fuck you, Jacob!”

All the while the enemy is stood around, some looking nervously at each other, others twisting one foot on its side and staring embarrassedly at the sole of their boot as they rock back and forth on it, yet others kicking at stones and suffering that intense moment of panic when they see the stone veer off in the direction of the two idiot humans yelling red-faced at each other on the other side of the battlefield. The humans see the stone whiz past, look up and seem to see the enemy for the first time, and then set the poor unfortunate individual on fire under a hail of Inferno ammo, then just as rapidly extinguish the flames and freeze the poor sod in place, before melting the ice away with a hail of incendiary fire, and so on and so forth, until eventually the poor fellow simply evaporates into a steamy mist and his companions look on in slack-jawed disbelief and wide-eyed horror while the humans go back to arguing with one another.

Thankfully my two regular companions didn’t have such ammo options; even so, I made sure I levelled them up by hand, just in case they tried to sneak a new ammo power in there while I wasn’t looking.

So what makes these Bioware games great? The game design is formulaic within the Bioware RPG genre. The game play is good, but isn’t outstanding by any measure: the cover system in Mass Effect 2 is a great addition, for example, but just doesn’t seem to be as elegant as that found in, say, Gears of War; the cover system is also somewhat infuriating.

“Hah, I see you Mr Enemy, and I shall duck behind this wall and fire from cover, what do you think about that?!”

“Well, I can only commend you on your tactics. I concede that it is a well thought out and thoroughly good plan. I, however, will see your ‘Cover’ and raise you ‘Walking Through A Hail of Bullets and Crowd Control And Just Punching You In The Face While You’re Glued To A Wall And Unable To Attack Me Back’.”

“Touché. And also: Ow, my face.”

There are a number of game play ‘features’ that are undesirable; also, the textures on many of the NPC character outfits look awful to the point of distraction when in a close-up shot, such as in most conversations; and then there’s the planet scanning/probing/mining mini-game. Actually, let’s not go there, that’s a dark place and my counsellor worked so very hard to help me get through it without too much medication. Suffice it to say, if you’re an MMO player it will nearly kill you via your OCD completionist indoctrination, and if you’re not an MMO player then you’ll do the bare minimum to gather the resources you need to complete the game, and remember later that you were quite bored at the time.

So what makes most games journalists froth at the mouth at these Bioware games, because on the whole, if you take a hard look at them, they’re not perfect by any sense of the imagination. My theory is simple, and probably fairly obvious: they tell a good story with your character at the centre of it. That’s it. If Bioware remade Pacman then Pacman would go around trying to recruit pellets to help him, those pellets would refuse to activate his super power unless he helped them find their long lost aunt on the other side of the map, he’d do a bunch of side missions in order to grab some fat fruit loot, and then he’d head in to the final battle with a bunch of ghosts, using his pellet companions to weaken and defeat them, and any pellets he didn’t need to use would come back for Pacman 2. There would be problems with the game play: sometimes pellets wouldn’t activate properly, or Pacman would go off one side of the screen and never come back on the other. However, there would also be a tale woven between all of this, about how our man was the last in the long and noble line of Pac, and that an ancient blight of undead was once again upon the lands and could only be defeated if he discovered how to wield the unknowable Power of Pellet, knowledge long lost to his people in the dim mists of history. Pacman would become a personality to you, because you influenced his decisions on which pellets to get and which paths to take, and therefore you can identify with the character, because that character is, in part, you.

Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience. — Walt Disney

And Bioware’s Pacman would be a magical experience.

There is another company that offers magical experiences, one form of which is the theme park. They have people they call Imagineers who build systems that offer escapism, albeit briefly, into another world. If you look too closely at the rides you can see the wires, the smoke machines, and the rotating mirrors that cause things to appear out of nothing as if by magic. If you sit back, however, and relax into the ride, let the experience wash over you, you find yourself transported somewhere fantastic, and when you come out at the other end you find yourself a little disappointed to find that the world in which you live is somewhat mundane in comparison.

I imagine that Bioware’s version of Imagineers have been busy for some time crafting the Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 experiences, and I find myself joining the back of the already miles-long line of people, breathless in anticipation of my chance to ride on Bioware’s next great digital ride.

We like to have a point of view in our stories, not an obvious moral, but a worthwhile theme. … All we are trying to do is give the public good entertainment. That is all they want. — Walt Disney

The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.

The Ewok Festival of Love returns to Star Wars Galaxies on February 9th.

Empire agents everywhere will get the chance to charge around the galaxy, hunting and locking up all those sexual deviants who like to participate in festivals where the objective is to love-up small children dressed in teddy bear outfits.

In the meantime, members of the Rebel Alliance will have the opportunity to show George Lucas just how much they appreciated Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure by slaughtering Ewoks wholesale and crafting a lost-technology-quality bind-on-equip coat from their skins, called the Fuculucas.

As one would rightly expect from the name, the Ewok Festival of Love is a wondrous time for wholesale slaughter in the Star Wars galaxy. Enjoy!

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Top tier guild renowned for knowing fights inside and out, and pouring through combat logs and spreadsheets in order to understand the minutiae and thus maximise their ability to beat encounters, suffers sudden and convenient oversight of exploit which happens to make the encounter dramatically easier, and is shocked to be punished for it.

Guild claims wide-eyed angelic innocence, guild’s friends agree.

Film at 11.