Monthly Archives: June 2010

First items in the LotRO Store announced.

In a made up statement earlier today, Turbine announced that the first items available in the new Lord of the Rings Online game store would be the names Legolas1 through Legolas999999 for 50 Turbine points each, and the names Aragorn1 through Aragorn999999 for 100 points each.

In other news, veteran LotRO players seemed most excited about the forthcoming influx of Spunkmaster McGimli and Lukeskywalker vonBigwang37s in to the LotRO starter areas and beyond.

Rumours that Turbine are also planning to sell boars, legendary weapons with decent legacies, and a sparkly Balrog mount that will be the first flying mount in the game (which is fine, because Balrogs have wings), are unfounded at this time.

Patch notes show that one minor change has been introduced to the game’s epic Book content so far: Gandalf now shouts “You shall not pass! Unless you have purchased the You Shall Pass pass[TM} from the LotRO Store for 250 Turbine points. Buy Now!”

Reporting live for Oh MMO Emo News, I’m Melmoth Melmothson.

Thought for the day

Big, glowing target or destination indicators floating around the screen in games have often been immersion-breaking necessities, but low on health in Grand Theft Auto IV I was searching the streets for a food vendor the old fashioned way by driving around and keeping my eyes peeled, as they don’t show up on the map to allow you to set an easy waypoint. With location-aware “augmented reality” iPhone and Android applications like Layar that use the GPS and camera to overlay a mini-map and points of interest where you’re looking, you could probably pull up the location of the nearest hot dog stand in New York, and get user reviews of it; maybe it’s real life that’s getting a bit unrealistic now. Until a bag of peanuts can cure gunshot wounds, though, GTAIV probably still has the edge.

Cognitive Dissonance as an Obstacle to Performing the Bus Stop

The second of Grand Theft Auto IV’s Liberty City Stories, The Ballad of Gay Tony, is an improvement over The Lost and Damned in that the lead character and his boss aren’t instantly and unremittingly unlikeable, though sadly the same can’t be said of some of the NPCs you work for and have to suffer over-long cutscenes with. Still, the gameplay remains fun, you get a few new toys like parachutes for base jumping, and there are some new activities in the club you manage including dancing.

I do like a bit of a rhythm game, and in the grand tradition GTAIV “dancing” consists of pressing keys in time to music. It starts out a bit freestyle, you can press any key in time to the beat, and if you can manage that for a while then everyone joins in for a bit of a set-piece performance in which you have to press specific keys as they flash up on screen.

After all-too-many years on a QWERTY keyboard I can more or less touch type, I don’t need to look at the keys. When the game flashed up “D”, though, I had no idea where it was and had to glance down at the keyboard, by which time it was too late, and I realised that when “WASD” are used for movement they cease to be letters, they’re just directions, forward, left, back, right. Arrow keys (as used later in the song), no problem at all, and if the letters were accompanied by a direction I’m sure I could hit them easily enough, but “A” on its own required translation to “left” within the context of the game before I could hit it, taking too much time, and I failed the performance earning much derision from the rest of the dance floor. I managed it on the second attempt, but it took a fair bit of effort, and I still missed a few steps. Gave me an idea for a sequel to Typing of the Dead, though: Mavis Beacon Teaches Dancing.

Thought for the day.

Bioware will do to LotRO’s epic story content what Blizzard did to Everquest’s quest content.

But is the Star Wars setting as universally accessible as Azeroth?

Here’s a thought: WoW gained critical mass because very early on it convinced a large enough section of the non-‘male 18-30’ market that it was for them as much as anyone. As soon as you have large population diversity in a social space you will get the Facebook phenomenon, and let’s not forget that WoW was right there with Facebook at the start of the current online social peer recruitment zeitgeist.

Granny posts updates on Facebook. Granny plays a Night Elf Hunter in WoW.

Will Granny want to play a Jedi?

A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

The trouble with LotRO’s epic quest book content is not so much the amount of travel, although it is possibly verging on the excessive side, it’s the fact that upon arriving at your destination the task to be performed is often disproportionately short in comparison – speak to Geoff/retrieve Geoff’s glowing object/find Geoff’s mother-in-law/kill Geoff’s slimy scaly enemy – after which you are then required to travel all the way back to the quest giver.

The archetypal MMO moment of misery or madness (MMOMOMOM) comes when you are then immediately sent back to the same location to perform another similarly mundane and quickly completed task – speak to Geoff’s object/retrieve Geoff’s glowing enemy/kill Geoff’s slimy scaly mother-in-law – after which you are then required to travel all the way back to the quest giver again.

The critical thing is this: even if the time spent travelling was equal to the time spent playing the game, the perceived time spent travelling would still be greater. Time flies when you’re having fun, and I think Turbine dramatically overestimated the proportion of the player populace who would rank Equine Buttock Observation in their Top Ten Gaming Greats. If you send someone halfway across the world on a quest, then you really should give them quest content when they get there that’s greater in perceived duration than that travel time, before sending them all the way back again.

I think this is a legacy problem from the early days of Turbine’s design for their game, and they have slowly moved towards the theme park design where quests are clumped together and give the player a great deal to do once they’ve travelled to that pocket of content, along with experimenting with alternative forms of advancement. Perhaps this was always the intended design, that the epic quest book content would require an epic level of ‘dedication’ or ‘work’ or ‘tedium’ to achieve the end goal, the reward for which seems to consist of simply being able to say that you’ve finally done it… I think you get a horse too, a slightly ironic reward for a quest line in which you spend a good seventy percent of the time staring at a horse’s arse as you travelled back and forth across Middle Earth.

I haven’t completed the epic quest content on any of my characters yet. Every now and again it niggles at me that I haven’t managed to slog through it and so, like an itchy scab, I pick at the edges of it occasionally, but as with a scab, I quickly reach the point where the picking hurts more than the itching annoys, and I’m forced to leave it alone again.

Considering their entire MMO is based on a similar idea of epic story content, I hope Bioware are paying attention to this.

Reviewlet: Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal

Going Postal is Sky One’s third Terry Pratchett adaptation. The first, Hogfather, seemed a bit of an odd choice, jumping into the middle of the Discworld series with a story about belief featuring an anthropomorphic Death as a hero, and though impressively put together it was a tough place to start for someone new to Pratchett. The second, The Colour of Magic, was rather more logically based on the first two books in the series, but they’re not my favourite of his.

Going Postal is a later Discworld book and features Moist von Lipwig, a con artist offered a choice between death and cake. Wait, not cake, I meant sorting out the Ankh-Morpork post office, fallen into disuse with the advent of The Clacks, an optical telegraph system. The Clacks exemplify the technological aspects that have steadily been introduced to the Discworld universe alongside its more magical origins, making it a more accessible analogue for our world, and the self-contained and comparatively straightforward plot of plucky underdog triumphing over corporate greed kept my non-Pratchett-reading wife interested where she’d wandered off during the previous two serials.

The production is lavish, with great attention to detail in the sets topped off by judicious use of CGI; apparently two million envelopes were addressed by hand to dress the Post Office, and even a minor location like a pin shop is transformed into an emporium to delight the most ardent pointy-fastening enthusiast. The performances are very good as well, Richard Coyle’s Lipwig holding things together (though I still can’t help but think of him as Jeff from Coupling) well supported by Ian Bonar and Andrew Sachs as Stanley and Groat in the Post Office, Charles Dance lends considerably more gravitas than a Culture ship name to Venitari, Claire Foy is a suitably threatening Miss Dearheart, but David Suchet slightly steals the show with a scenery-chewing anti-Poirot performance as Reacher Gilt, the villain of the piece. There’s a particularly lovely cameo from Sir Pterry himself right at the end as well. All in all an excellent way to spend a Bank Holiday, even for a newcomer to Pratchett.

A good description is a magician that can turn an ear into an eye.

At some point yesterday evening, during our weekly sojourn to the lands of Middle Earth, the thread of discussion began to wrap itself around the curious issue of the names of our skills and abilities, and subsequently tied itself in ten different kinds of knot. The naming of skills and abilities is a curious thing, some MMOs, such as WoW, take the prosaic route of explaining what the skill is: Fireball; Fireball II – The Revenge of Fireball; Fireball IV; Fireball III Sir! Whereas other MMOs, such as LotRO and Guild Wars (specifically the Ritualist class), adopt a more flowery naming convention that attempts to invoke the essence of the skill rather than the ability itself: Attuned Was Songkai; In Defence of Middle Earth; Every Sperm is Sacred.

Not entirely sure about the last one.

I’m not sure which I prefer to be honest; they’re like disparate cooking styles, with WoW and company being your traditional home-cooked meal – honest and hearty but unexciting and predictable – whereas LotRO’s chefs cook up something a little more exotic, more nouvelle cuisine, where you marvel at one another about the subtle flavours and aromas of the skill name, how clever the thing is and how delightful it is to look at, and then you all have to admit that you have no idea what the hell it’s supposed to be and have to ask the waiter to explain it. I picture the tooltip in LotRO as a slightly haughty French maître d’ who explains in exasperated tones just what the skill does, whilst heavily hinting that you can’t possibly appreciate its subtle layers, being the cultureless nincompoop that you are.

If you listed all of the Captain’s skills in LotRO by name only and asked me to explain what they do, I’m pretty sure I’d only get a few right. To save face I’d probably have a stab at guessing their meaning, sure, like some hapless Englishman in a foreign restaurant, red cheeked and stubbornly refusing to ask for help in translating the menu, and after a lengthy act of pointed deliberation that would have made the RSC proud, he confidently and loudly orders two platters of “Please do not smoke in the restaurant, thank you” for himself and his wife.

The Captain has a few iconic abilities that I know the name of: IDoME the aforementioned In Defence of Middle Earth, a legendary trait that is probably one of the best buffs in the game; Words of Courage, a single target heal, which I remember because the name evokes an image of my Captain giving a pep talk much like a boxing coach at ringside, the fellowship’s Guardian sits on a stool with a towel around their neck, and I give their shoulders a massage as they gasp chestily between sips from a water bottle “Now e’s a big fella this troll, so yarve got ter get in closer, don give im the range on yer. Keep in tight and slap im wiv yer shield an yer’ll be peachy”; and Rallying Cry because it’s the skill I use the most and the one I’m always trying to activate as often as possible. I’m sure I could stumble through a few others, but generally though the skills along my bar are placed in such a way as to make sense to the way I play, and in my mind they’re named after what they do in the most basic fashion, such that more professional players would sneer the sneer of the maître d’ who was asked for some of that cold leek soup, were they ever to hear me describe them. There’s the stabby one; the stabby one with a DoT bleed; the stabby one that heals someone; the stabby one that gets aggro; the stabby one that I can only use when an enemy has been defeated; and there’s the shouty one that lets me use the other stabby ones; the shouty one that boosts attack speed; the shouty one that stuns; and the shouty one that grabs aggro. And so on. I remember more of the gambits on my Warden, but that’s only because I have to keep looking them up every five seconds to remember how to execute the pattern of attacks required to activate them. And I don’t look up Exaltation of Battle, I look down the list for the ‘big AoE morale draining thing that’s really quite cool’, and then see the name and go “oh yeah, that’s what it’s called”, and then forget it again five seconds later.

Does it matter, this thematic naming of skills over a more practical but immediately comprehensible system? I don’t think so: I quite like the flavourful approach in the main, and although it makes returning to my alts a little more tricky after having been away for a while “Hmm, this character has a skill called Gust of Wind. What does it do? Do I need to hold my nose?” it’s not as though it presents a major hurdle to getting back up to speed with the class in fairly short order.

I did wonder how I’d choose to name skills in the Melmoth MMO, and I further wondered how I’d go about coming up with the names, but in the course of writing this post a very elegant solution came to light. It turns out that the lyrics to the chorus of the Chicken Song lend themselves perfectly to skill descriptions as I think you’ll agree:

Hold a chicken in the air

Stick a deckchair up your nose

Buy a jumbo jet

Bury all your clothes

Paint your left knee green

Form a string quartet

Pretend your name is Keith

Skin yourself alive

Learn to speak Arapahoe

Climb inside a dog

Behead an Eskimo

Eat a Renault Four with salami in your ears

Casserole your Gran

Disembowel yourself with spears

I leave the tooltip descriptions of what the skills actually do as an exercise for the reader.