Monthly Archives: March 2010

Chernobyl Fallout

Early in STALKER: Call of Pripyat I’d taken on a job to provide some extra muscle for a squad of stalkers who were breaking up a weapons deal. Creeping up to the rendezvous in the twilight I switched off my torch and scanned the place with binoculars; the deal was in an old industrial building, I could see the weapons broker in the doorway talking to his bandit customer, a couple of mercenary bodyguards and other bandits were patrolling the area, there were bound to be more inside.

Creeping closer to join the squad I was supporting, I had to position myself carefully. A solidly constructed outbuilding offered good cover, with windows overlooking the warehouse for an excellent firing position. My flimsy body armour was barely up to stopping pistol shots, so staying out of a hail of assault rifle fire seemed like a pretty good idea. My battered AKM wasn’t exactly a precision weapon, but I could snap off a few shots in the general direction of the bandits, stay pretty safe, let the rest of the squad do the hard work and report back for the payment.

That wouldn’t do at all, though. The exit of the outbuilding faced away from the warehouse, it would take too long to get out and cross the ground once the squad went in. I couldn’t just hide out of the way, I had to stick with the rest of the guys, so I formed up and waited for the squad leader to give the signal. At a wave of his hand the stalkers opened up: a mercenary fell straight away, the rest dived for cover and wildly returned fire. Our squad pressed forward, someone chucked a grenade to clear a couple of bandits from behind a pile of pipes, I saw my opportunity and sprinted forward to do what I was really here for: stripping the corpses of weapons and other useful stuff before the other stalkers could get to it.

I’ve really been enjoying Call of Pripyat. I played the first of the STALKER series, Shadow of Chernobyl, rough edges and not-compatible-with-save-game-patch and all, but never quite got around to the second, Clear Sky. A couple of weeks back Steam popped up a “loyalty offer” of a fiver off Call of Pripyat if you owned either of the previous games on Steam, and though I’d originally bought the box of the first game it was also part of the complete THQ pack, and that was all the incentive I needed to hit “Buy Now”.

Like the original, life is harsh when you’re first chucked into the Zone. If you’re not being savaged by the mutated wildlife you’re stumbling into radioactive or chemical hazards, or being chucked around by gravitational anomalies. The first time I started the game I looked around a bit, got up to make a cup of coffee or something without pausing it, and when I got back to the PC there were frantic radio messages telling me to seek shelter as there was a radioactive emission on the way, and even as I started sprinting for cover the screen flashed white and my first foray came to an ignominious end.

Though you’ve got an over-arching mission to track down five military helicopters that crashed in the Zone, you need to spend a while building up your resources to be able to find them all (and survive for more than a couple of seconds in their vicinity), and that early part of the game really shone for me, where you’re scavenging every old weapon and bit of ammo you can, to either use or (if in decent enough nick) sell. NPC AI isn’t exactly going to cause worries about Skynet taking over, but it’s realistic enough that stalkers and bandits wander about, pick up decent guns if they’re lying around, engage in firefights with each other or hostile wildlife and generally make the place seem lived-in. You get missions like the one I opened with, where you’re definitely fully committed to stamping out the bandits/mercenaries/rogue wildlife, but the bloke you’ve been sent out with has quite a nice weapon, and… well, obviously it would be unsporting if you shot him yourself, but if he happened to come a cropper, and you happened to snatch up the gun from his not-yet-cold dead fingers… it’s what he would have wanted.

Call of Pripyat has quite a strong Oblivion/Morrowind vibe; Fallout 3 is a natural comparison, only instead of a slightly kitsch 50s-America-in-the-future providing the background to the apocalypse it’s grim ex-Soviet concrete tower blocks. In both games I could happily spend a while looting an area, ferrying as much as my carrying capacity would allow into temporary caches, then back to the rough tin box that counted as home (though that probably says more about me than the games), slowly building up and upgrading an arsenal of weapons, ammunition and armour. Call of Pripyat doesn’t exactly sparkle in the text dialogue (I’m not sure if it’s a slightly weird sense of humour or gap in translation that makes you sign off half your conversations with “fugedaboudit”) or almost-trademark rough voice acting, but it’s efficient enough to send you off to do various bits and pieces around the Zone, and there are some nice set pieces here and there.

The last third of the game was a bit of a disappointment; once tooled up with an upgraded assault rifle and suit of armour you don’t really need to scavenge any more, and the missions in Pripyat were a bit linear, though there were a few neat shoot-outs and a spooky underground lab to explore. The very final mission was a real anticlimax, I was expecting a brutal fight for survival but it was a comparative walk in the irradiated park. Still, it didn’t take too much of the gloss off the rest of the game, and I’ll definitely have a search to see what mods are out there and give it another go sometime. Two slightly radioactive thumbs up!

Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known.

I sometimes catch myself wondering whether MMOs aren’t just some huge and complex experiment to determine a new universal constant scale based upon the amount of aggravation a person will accept before they leave an activity that is supposed to be considered entertainment.

I imagine it to be called the Shit to Quit ratio.

People in white lab coats set up various experiments where the subjects are tested over and over again against nonsensical, repetitive, frustrating or downright broken game mechanics until the breaking point is found and they quit the game in a torrent of rage and exasperation.

I think I’ve found my sweet spot on the scale with LotRO: there are several mechanics in that game that drive me almost to unsubscribe – a primary contender being random stuns that wrest control of my character away from me for any length of time – and yet I keep playing because those things are few and far enough between that they don’t quite drive me over the edge.

But only just.

Think of the benefits to society that we MMO players will provide if a Shit to Quit scale can be determined and a person’s place on it can be pinpointed accurately! Jobs could be matched to those people who will take crap from the boss without walking out the door; theme parks could be designed to make use of the absolute extremes of acceptable queue length without people leaving altogether; and movies could be made as short and repetitive as possible without audiences abandoning the cinema.

So remember, the next time you are feared uncontrollably into a pack of patrolling mobs during a dungeon run, or can’t run up the gentle incline of a slope, or have to fight your way through a bunch of pointless low XP, high HP mobs to get to a destination, you are doubtless secretly serving towards the advancement of humanity!

It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.

Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online had a bonus XP event this weekend past in celebration of the fact that Turbine failed to close the game down after less than stellar subscription numbers, and where NCSoft would have flipped the kill switch on the servers a few days after release, Turbine decided to experiment with the solid game and intellectual property which they had in their possession, and now DDO is marching steadily ever forward on the MMO battlefield under the banner of the Earl of Free To Play.

See that NCSoft? That there is what you do with a solid game that hasn’t quite had the fortune to capture the hearts and minds of gamers yet. Let’s all take a small moment to mourn the fact that we don’t have a free-to-play Tabula Rasa, shall we?

So yes, it’s DDO’s birthday, and the weekends of the 26th – 28th of February and 5th – 7th of March have been dubbed an MMORPGasmic XPalooza by… um, me, and as such it was a prime time to roll a new character and get a few levels under their +2 Belt of Grinding.

And of course no such adventure would be complete if I didn’t spend money in the DDO Store. Happy Birthday DDO! Here, I bought you an adventure pack! Well ok, technically I bought me an adventure pack, but it’s the thought that counts. You got some money, I got hours of entertainment, which is very much like the time that I gave my brother some money for his birthday and then I got hours of entertainment watching him get yelled at by our parents when he blew the cat’s litter tray to smithereens with the bangers that he’d bought with said money. Thankfully the cat wasn’t in (on?) the litter tray at the time, but only because my brother got the fuse length wrong; still, if ever there is a right place for a cat to be when it is surprised by a modest incendiary device being detonated from underneath it, the litter tray is probably that place.

I happened to have Veteran Status on my account, which I purchased a while ago (Happy pre-Birthday DDO!), and so I was able to create a level four character and skip a chunk of content that I had already run several times on other alts, thus allowing me to play through some new content straight away, with the secondary aim of getting as close to level seven as possible with a mind to joining m’colleague, Van Hemlock and the Tuesday Noob Club That Now Also Gathers On A Friday Club for further hot lathered DDO action.

So levelling was my aim, possibly extreme levelling, the sort of levelling that has a capital ‘X’ in the middle of the word extreme, and has its own station on satellite TV where the men are all bronzed beefcakes who say things like ‘dude’ and ‘whoa’ through a fringe of hair so long that it’s sometimes hard to tell whether you’re looking at them from the front or the rear, made all the more difficult because they seem to wear half of their baggy shapeless clothing backwards. If you want to learn to be extreme, you have to be willing to brave the dangers of the field in which you’re trying to do so: surfers eventually have to face that bloody big breaker, snowboarders have to make that off-piste jump into nothingness, BASE jumpers have to throw themselves off of that building, and MMO players have to visit the game’s forums. I wasn’t ready to be quite that eXtreme, though, so I made good use of the Google safety wheels and just searched around until I found a link to a thread on the DDO forums where someone posted a brief unapologetic list of the adventures that they found to be best for XP; having run the first few adventures in the list already, and having known them to be good sources of XP, I found the next item on the list was Tangleroot Gorge, an adventure area that I hadn’t played before. Good XP and new content? Sign me up!

Right after I pay you some money. Happy Birthday DDO!

So yes, I had to buy Tangleroot Gorge, which is probably why I hadn’t played it before, but I was deep into the spirit of celebration. And I’d just been paid for the month; my credit card was once again a shiny golden passport to possibility, rather than a singularity of infinite financial density within my wallet that threatens to suck me and my whole life into its black oblivion. A matter not helped by the fact that I keep spending indiscriminate amounts of money on impulse purchases, I might add.

So with my impulse purchase adventure pack unwrapped and installed into the game, I was ready to begin my levelling run. Right after I purchased a potion that I noticed in the store which gave an additional hefty boost to XP gain and which, a brief search revealed, stacked with the existing XP boost that Turbine were giving players over the weekend.

Oh dear.

My credit card started to pulse and thrum a little at that point, and it was fairly easy to see that time and space were beginning to be warped by the debt horizon that was building, so I popped it into my wallet, encased the wallet in lead and concrete, threw it into the nearby river, and got on with actually playing the game. My twice XP boosted game. I could feel my fringe growing rapidly, but there was going to be much work needed on the beefcake look; so, while I waited for the game to load, I put my trousers on backwards and pulled a beanie hat on to my head instead.

Next time: Tangleroot Gorge, and the joys of motile armoured organisms that can heal.