Monthly Archives: October 2010

I am a man of many talents. But I’m only allowed to use these ones.

So what purpose do talents serve in World of Warcraft these days? The recent patch preparing the game for the Cataclysm expansion has brought a revamped talent system that is simpler and more intuitive than ever, but at the same time, as darkeye pointed out in a comment, it drastically reduces the concept of choice and flexibility which talents were originally designed to provide. It seems now that talents have been boiled down to not much more than two choices: ‘Which sub-class do you wish to play?’ and ‘Do you intend to PvP or not?’.

For some classes there’s still some debate out there amongst bloggers as to which talents are definitely worth picking up; I’m certainly seeing varying opinions on protection warrior talents at the moment, but it’s mainly the difference between one or two talent points invested in one talent or another, nothing particularly class-defining, and most likely to be ironed into a perfectly flat raid t-shirt by the people at Elitist Jerks in short order, after which every protection tank will wear the same t-shirt, and woe betide you in a PuG if you have creases down the arms of your talent T.

So what do talents provide? Well, they still provide sub-class defining abilities: each talent tree, while locking you in for the first thirty one points and not letting you dabble in other trees at all until then (this is a local talent tree, for local people), will provide some major ability that once would have been a mid-to-top tier talent in the old system. More importantly they provide a levelling incentive. With talent points having been switched to every odd level, it now means that Blizzard can smooth out the number of abilities they have to dish out each level. With the heavy pollarding of the talent tree all the juicy abilities look that much closer now, even though the player is receiving talents at a slower rate than before and will therefore technically receive major talents in the same level range as before. The spell book is much the same, with all abilities your character will earn being listed in each of the sub-class pages along with which level they will be gained at. The whole thing is geared towards tempting the player on and giving them further impetus to grab that next level and get a new ability; pull the lever, get a pellet.

Essentially then, it seems that talents have been transformed into a mini-spell book, in which you pick one path to define your character and then you follow that for specific abilities to help you in your precisely defined role. Interestingly, however, it appears that glyphs might be fast becoming the customisation option that talents once were – as much as you ever get to customise your character to your liking in a game that has more analysis and stringent regulations on How You Shall Do Things than the Great Firewall of China. With the fundamental changes to glyphs – once you learn a glyph it is permanently available to you, and glyphs can be changed easily through the use of cheaply vendor purchasable vanishing powder – it’s easy to customise your character in fairly useful ways without much expense or hassle. This seems most unBlizzardlike, however, and I expect vanishing powder to be changed to a rare raid drop costing 4000 gold on the AH and requiring a twenty seven part quest chain to be completed before it can be used, by the time the expansion is released. Admittedly the range and usefulness of glyphs varies wildly from class to class at the moment, with some classes having a wealth of options and others being rather limited in what they can make use of, especially when you factor in the narrowing of specialisation that each sub-class presents – there’s probably no point in using tanking glyphs on a Fury warrior, for example. However, the important point is that the glyph system is far more open to expansion than the old talent tree system, so where additions to the talent trees only came with major patches and expansions, new glyphs can be added to the Inscription profession without having to majorly rework part of a class’s levelling mechanic. I think it’s this flexibility-in-expansion that might see glyphs become the customisation option that players have always been hankering for since the first paladin tried to create a hybrid melee healer talent build and was laughed out of their raid. It’s certainly easier for Blizzard to experiment with glyphs than with talents from a mechanics standpoint, at least.

I would say that it’s a fun time at the moment to experiment with builds, Spinks has posted her protection warrior build of the moment, and although it differs from other builds that I’ve read about (and those builds differ from yet others) none of them are drastically changed from one another, it’s mostly personal opinion on one or two borderline talents, which may or may not be useful depending on your play style and situation. However, as Tam recently related, it’s not necessarily all fun and games trying to get people to understand how your new talents and abilities work in this brave new world, especially when that world doesn’t seem entirely sure what it wants you to do either. Eventually I imagine things will even out, the raiding scene will settle in to their usual work ethic, and talent specs will once again assume their traditional cookie-cutter form, but I hope that glyphs (with further tweaks and additions on Blizzard’s part) might still allow for some expression of individuality in an otherwise generic end-game of Tier <unsigned int> geared, cookie-cutter talented, Stepford Wipes. Wives, even.

The other night I tripped a nice continental drift divide.

Podcast evidence to the contrary, it didn’t actually take too much deliberation for me to subscribe to World of Warcraft again. I came to the opinion that if one has ever been invested in WoW at any point in time it would be a shame to miss out on the forthcoming cataclysm. The release of patch 4.0.1 was the catalyst for my return, and I was resolved to revisit my account and use my credit card to awaken it from its catatonic state. The next great WoW expansion is not due for another couple of months, but the forthcoming catastrophic world events are already being felt across the lands of Azeroth: the world trembling at its very foundation from time to time.

Two months may seem like a long time to have to wait before the actual release of the expansion, but when you consider that I need to apply numerous AddOn cataplasms to my UI before I am able to play happily, it seems like no time at all. I am a fool for UI twiddling, and with the expansiveness of WoW’s aftermarket AddOns being legendary, it is ripe for abuse by someone such as myself, a feedback catabolic: one who breaks down complex UI elements into simpler systems, and thus releases the energy otherwise used in fixed concentration to be diverted to more important areas, such as hat selection and the timing of fart emotes during boss fights. A catalogue of my AddOns would rival the indexes of the Ancient Library of Alexandria in scope, and as such I won’t bore you with them here.

In fact, that’s pretty much the extent of my return thus far, a small part of the inevitable migration of catadromous players who, having been living a quiet life in the fresh waters of other MMOs, now return to WoW’s oceanic population for a fresh orgy of spawning, with new life being breathed once more into Azeroth as players are catapulted into a world which is both familiar and unfamiliar. Thus far the changes have been pleasing in the main, with numerous systems in place to hold the hand of those who merely want to dabble in the game: the talent interface requires you to press a button to learn the talents you have selected, and gently reminds you that you have untrained talents if you close the window without doing so; the level-up experience is streamlined, with a message across the display telling you your new level and then announcing any new abilities or talent points you have earned, although a trip to the trainer is still required to gain them, something that Everquest II still does better, in my opinion.

That really was the extent of my experience so far. Having spent several days downloading patches overnight, then the odd hour here and there over another couple of days devoted to downloading AddOns and configuring them to my liking, and then further time setting up keyboard and gameboard key-binds, I’ve done little other than wander around on a couple of low level characters, trying to get a feel for what class I’d like to play when I roll my Worgen. I’m thinking of taking a step outside of my comfort zone, thanks in part to great experiences with my Warden in Lord of the Rings Online, and picking up a class that I don’t usually consider playing. In the meantime it’s a matter of picking an existing level eighty character and familiarising myself with the class so that I can enjoy the events leading up to the impending cataclysm.

There’s not that long to prepare; the earthquakes have already begun.

If the Prophets of Rem are to be believed, next it will be birds and snakes.

Followed by an aeroplane.

Then it’s the end of the world as we know it.

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it

Here at KiaSA, we’re big fans of giant stompy robots. In games, that is; real, actual, the-future-as-per-Terminator style killing machines hunting down and exterminating the last traces of humanity wouldn’t be on our Christmas card list even if they did exist. In-game giant stompy robots, though, two mechanical thumbs up.

I’m not particularly familiar with the Front Mission series of games due to their Japanese console origin, but the latest, Front Mission Evolved, is out on the PC, and I was somewhat tempted by the prospect of giant robot action until I read the Rock, Paper, Shotgun review, which says stuff like:

“You never feel like the wanzer is huge, just that everything else is small. You are a robot on a day out at the model village, with lots of pyrotechnics to make things exciting.”

On the plus side it’s given me an idea for a brilliant trip to Babbacombe Model Village if I can get hold of a Transformers fancy dress outfit and some fireworks. On the minus side it doesn’t sound like a particularly great game, though I might still keep half an eye out in case it’s in a bargain Steam sale or something. That paragraph also hints at perhaps a more fundamental flaw with the series.

The word “wanzer”.

Giant stompy robots have received various names in games; Battletech’s ‘Mechs may be the best known western example, there are the Hounds in Chromehounds, Earthsiege gets the “most tortured acronym” award for its “Humaniform-Emulation Roboticized Combat Unit with Leg-Articulated Navigation”, or HERCs. Apparently wanzer is a term for mecha derived from the German “Wanderpanzer”, or “walking tank”, and it’s just rubbish. Maybe it’s just a British thing, in the same way that solemn lines like “I could tell at once that you were a bender” cause outbreaks of giggling over here, but to me “wanzer” sounds like a combination of “wanker” and “wazzock”, not really the image you want for your giant armoured machine of death. I’m not sure how they managed to stuff up a faux-German derivation so badly, with German being a language eminently suited for intimidating militaristic terminology; Fliegerabwehrkanone (aircraft defence cannon), Sturzkampfflugzeug (diving fighting aircraft) and of course Panzerkampfwagen (armoured fighting carriage), for example, abbreviate to the equally dangerous sounding Flak, Stuka and Panzer. I’m not sure “Wanderpanzer” is even technically accurate, though my German stalled around GCSE level when asking whether someone would like a Bratwurst with or without mustard, before the syllabus got to to the correct designations for military robots. I suspect something like “Panzerkampfwandernfahrzeug” might be closer to the mark, but would invite any readers with a more detailed knowledge of either (i) German or (ii) giant stompy robots (ideally both) to leave a comment…

KiaSAcast Episode 8

For those of you who are not monitoring our podcast RSS feed or stalking us on the Twitterverse, brace your main hats and hang on to your sails, because we’re pleased to announce that it’s time for KiaSAcast episode eight.

In this episode we talk about what we’re not playing.

This episode of the podcast includes:

– Introduction

– What we’re not playing, including::

     – World of Warcraft

     – APB

     – Dungeons and Dragons Online

     – EverQuest II Extended

     – Lord of the Rings Online

     – City of Heroes

     – World of Tanks

     – And others…

Download KiaSAcast Episode Eight

Genesis of an addiction.

In the beginning God created a new map.

And the earth was without form, and void; and so God punched a tree to get some wood. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters looking for a coal deposit.

And God placed the coal on a stick and said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness by digging a hole in a cliff and crafting a door.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’

And God placed blocks of soil, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it looked quite cool.

And God called the firmament his house. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, ‘Let the waters under the home be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear’: and he frantically placed blocks of stone in order to stop the water filling up his house.

And God called the dry land ‘thank fuck for that’; and the gathering together of the waters called ‘stupid leaks’: and God saw that it was good, but could probably do with some lava.

And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth’: but it was a multiplayer server, and this was alpha, so none of that was implemented yet.

And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: but he wasn’t fooling anyone with a couple of burning blocks of wood.

And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven, so that I may chop them up for eggs and feathers.’

And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.’ But he forgot to put up a fence and they all disappeared by the morning.

And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind’: and it was so. And the creeping things came in the night and exploded, destroying half the side of his house. And God was pissed.

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. He chopped them all up for resources, and ate bacon while putting the final stitches in his leather armour.

And God said, ‘Behold, I have gathered every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; for me it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have chopped it up and made something useful with it, or had a good meal.

And the evening and the morning were the sixth day, and his wife shouted down the stairs to stop playing goddamn Minecraft and come to bed.

And he muttered that she shouldn’t blaspheme his name. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.

And reluctantly he logged off.

Reviewlet: Halo: Reach – Single Player

Halo: Reach is the game that turned me into a Halo fanboy. I wouldn’t say I’m a true frothing, forum-bashing, smack-talking, willy-waving, Ha-lolife, but I’ve definitely gained a great respect for the series having played through Bungie’s swan song contribution to the franchise. I was brought into the FPS fold by Unreal, a friend’s demonstration of the Nali Castle flyby on his Voodoo-powered PC convincing me that gaming had arrived full-bore on the platform. I thus skipped the entire Xbox generation: having made a large investment in a gaming PC I didn’t see the need for a console, especially when I had the likes of Unreal, Half-Life and its accompanying fragfests: Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike with which to occupy myself, followed later by the time-devastating march of the MMOs.

Thus, when I did finally take the plunge and buy an Xbox 360 I steered clear of FPS games; having been raised on the immediacy and accuracy of a mouse I always had trouble becoming comfortable with, and proficient at, aiming using a thumb stick. It was Gears of War 2 that eventually converted me, or trained me that aiming ‘well enough’ on a console would get you through most games at normal difficulty, and that I could still join other consoling types and pull my weight, or at least camouflage my inaccuracy enough not to be laughed out of the game. I still wasn’t sure about Halo though, and having played the odd demo I couldn’t see what the fuss was all about and didn’t buy Halo 3 when its blockbusting release arrived and busted a fair few blocks. I grabbed Halo:ODST on the prospect of more cooperative online play with friends due to its Firefight mode sounding very similar to Gears of War 2’s Horde mode, but although I tried the single player game I couldn’t get into it, it was all too strange and seemed to rely too much on the player having prior knowledge of the game series to be able to get anywhere.

And so Halo: Reach arrived to much punditry aplomb, and with it came many comments on the lack of “circuitous, difficult to follow plots” that past Halo titles had ‘suffered’; in essence the game came without Master Chief and the baggage with which almost ten years of franchise development had lumbered him. It was time to revisit the Halo universe.

The musical score had an immediate impact upon me. The very instant the game starts its brief introductory synopsis you are presented with the sombre thumping military-like drum beat which evokes (for a non-Halo player like me) fond memories of Mass Effect, Aliens and the recent Battlestar Galatica TV series — quality sci-fi. The score is wonderful, atmospheric, brooding, ominous, and is pitched perfectly for the sci-fi story that the game is designed to present: the doom of the planet Reach.

I noted as I began the game that the introduction into the world is similar to that of ODST. As a silent no-name rookie you are introduced to a well established squad made up of strong characters whose personalities rub against one another to cause an awkward heated tension from the friction. Yet where ODST felt trite and generic, Reach’s characters were more believable and appealing and their personality traits, although obvious, were less in your face, perhaps an indication of progress in Bungie’s presentation of the generic hardcore combat unit, an understanding that players are by now, in the main, familiar with the tirelessly mediating and effectuating captain, the gentle giant of destruction, the brooding nut-job, the reserved assassin and the token female eye-candy.

The game breaks you in more gently than ODST too, it’s as though lessons were learned with ODST and that an understanding was reached that a break with Halo tradition also required a break with the assumption that the player was a hardcore Halo fanatic. Game mechanics are introduced slowly and sensibly, and although there is still a level of assumed familiarity — that, for example, you know how to operate the most bizarre game-based vehicle handling system known to man or Covenant — you are not thrown in at the deep end, but introduced to the enemy under controlled conditions that let you get to grips with the controls before more serious combat ensues. It’s a smooth, subtle tutorial that has you playing the game while learning it, rather than giving one of those stark immersion breaking tutorials of traditional FPS games, where the fully qualified combat recruit is forced to run through an exercise where they, as a first step, learn how to walk.

After that the game is of the standard FPS fare, but the story that is being told keeps the missions interesting and the player invested in the game. There are some nice highlights, such as the space combat mini-game which has a very Battlestar Galactica feel to it, and the cut-scene leading up to it had me whooping and bouncing in my seat, and was probably the point at which I started to get an idea of what Halo was all about. The weapons are generally satisfying; all the standard options are there from the assault rifle, to the sniper rifle, up to the grenade and missile launchers. If I were to be slightly critical it’s that the Covenant weapons feel far more powerful, but that is perhaps deliberate due to the fact that the Covenant are meant to be technologically superior. It’s a shame, however, that using the Covenant weapons is generally the preferred option — not only due to their power but due to the relative scarcity of ammunition for the UNSC weapons — because I preferred the more visceral and familiar feel of the assault rifle and its company. The reusable armour abilities are a nice touch, a semi-permanent power-up that offers an advantage for a short while before needing to slowly recharge itself for use once again. Only one of these abilities can be carried at a time, and although they are placed sensibly throughout the various levels, not all are offered at any one station, so a tactical decision is sometimes required. Or, like me, you just pick the faffing-great invulnerability shield generator whenever it becomes available, and stick with that.

The story of the combat squad itself is one that has been told numerous times and is a tale of inevitability; there are few surprises in the overall outcome, although the inevitable is delivered on occasion from out of the blue, and I think it does achieve its aim to shock you out of your familiarity zone, which again helps to keep things from feeling rather stale and regurgitated, which would otherwise be a danger even for someone unfamiliar with the franchise.

The ending, however, is what sold me on the game. It is the perfect every-tale of bravery and honour and sacrifice in the face of an overwhelming and superior force; you already know how the game is going to end because you are shown your future in the very opening scene, and yet you still want to believe that it will end differently — it doesn’t, but that just makes it all the better for it. Bungie has told the final chapter of their story developing Halo, which itself is the first chapter of the Halo story, and it sets the tone for what is to come after, both in terms of the existing games to which it serves as a prequel, and also those games which will be produced by the next developer to take up the Halo mantle. In the meantime there is plenty for Halo virgins such as myself to enjoy, because where a game such as Red Dead Redemption left me feeling glad that the ordeal was finally over, Halo:Reach left me wanting more, and so I plan to revisit the Halo games that I’ve missed in the past, while keeping an eye firmly on Bungie’s future developments.

I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion.

I was questing in the Lone Lands on my Hunter the other night and ran into another one of those curious issues I have with the current crop of MMOs. I’ve not much enthusiasm to play Lord of the Rings Online at the moment despite having a lifetime subscription, my faith in the game is slowly being sapped by the continued inability of Codemasters to translate Turbine’s free-to-play vision onto the European servers, a mirroring of the debacle that occurred with Dungeons and Dragons Online, and where the most likely outcome for LotRO now is for Codemasters to announce that they won’t be going free-to-play after all, followed shortly by everyone without a lifetime subscription jumping over to the good ship US Turbine, and eventually all accounts being migrated over to Turbine anyway.

It’s certainly hard to summon enthusiasm to play a game that other people can play for free but with more features and also all of the latest content.

I decided to pick at the few remaining quests I have in the Lone Lands before moving on to the North Downs proper, and the one quest I had left was to kill trolls in Harloeg. Off I run, dodging through wave after wave of mobstacles, ignoring their attempts to stop me. Honestly, it’s like walking down the high street of your local town while trying to dodge all the people wanting to scrounge money, solicit your opinion on washing powder, or get you to sign a petition to prevent cruelty to strawberries. You have orcs running after you “Excuse me sir? Sir? Do you believe in Eru? Can I interest you in the Church of Saurontology?”; crows flap around your head, cawing about time share apartments in Mordor; wargs chase at your heels trying to get you to stop and answer a survey for the Meat Marketing Board; Wights try to pin you down and sign you up to Support A Spirit – ‘A donation of just fifty silver a month could enable a ghoul or ghost to help themselves to haunt again’.

Regardless, I reach the trolls without having stopped for a single survey, kill the requisite number in short order, and head back. It was while dodging a particularly persistent sickle-fly who was, I think, trying to sell me on the merits of a comprehensive double glazing installation, that I ran into a dead end. It’s a curious design of Harloeg – and many places in MMOs – that the natural route in and out is actually a sheer cliff or some insurmountable obstacle, with the actual escape route being out of the way paths tucked off in far flung corners of the map. Each path is, of course, narrow and laden with mobstacles.

This annoys me. It’s not the fact that I have to go out of my way so much as the pretence at exploration that’s offered, using the landscape to force me to spend more time trudging around and fighting off unwanted solicitations from crap animals as if this was adventure. If there was something to actually explore as I ran off in a five mile detour around the outskirts of the map to find the way out… if there was a mob that ambushed me who dropped an item that started a quest, or was at the very least an interesting fight, it wouldn’t rankle quite so much. There’s nothing of the sort however, and there never is. It wouldn’t destroy the aesthetic of Harleog to have a path running down that cliff face, it wouldn’t cost the developer more than a minute or two of a player’s time to allow them to just wander back in a more direct route, and they could still put a bunch of mobstacles in the player’s way to dismount them at every step and slow them down to a combat crawl, if they really felt it necessary to rely on such base and derivative tactics. Harloeg is a particularly fine example because there’s actually a piece of land – right where most players would run back – which starts to ramp up towards the top of that cliff, and then stops short, and where perspective won’t let you see this until you’re all the way to the top. Seriously, they might as well have a sign at the top that says “Haw, haw! Run back down! Run back and then run all the way around! Off you go! Run little player, run! And know that all the while you’re running and not getting to play the game or have any sort of entertainment, you are paying us money! Ha ha ha he he ha ha he ho!”. It would be a big sign, admittedly, and I suppose it might give the game away a little early.

I’ve ‘wasted’ hours in Minecraft in my exploration; I say wasted because invariably I did nothing terribly productive with respect to the game world or my character, but I did find fascinating geological features, discovered new places that sparked my imagination as to how I could turn them into a productive home, and I had so much fun that those hours passed like minutes. Trying to get anything done in MMOs such as LotRO makes minutes feel like hours. If you’re going to be a lazy developer and have quest hubs that load me up with quests, send me running halfway across the map to kill a specific type of boar because the ones right outside just won’t do, and the fifteen hundred I’ve killed up until now just don’t count, you really shouldn’t then get all creative when it comes to making obnoxious geographical hoops for me to jump through in a blatant attempt to artificially hike the amount of time I have to spend slogging around trying to get anything done, dodging pointless mobstacles all the while. Talk about rubbing it in.

MMOs also need to break out of the mindset that says placing static spawns of tedious uninteresting mobs between quest hubs and quest locations is anything akin to adventure, excitement or fun. It really isn’t. But perhaps more on that another time.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I posted about Fluxx a while back, and I think it’s fair to say the comments had a mixed view on the merits of this card game of changing rules. It’s definitely not something to play as a serious competition as there’s a massive amount of randomness and almost no possible strategy, a computer simulation of Fluxx would be a terrible game. Playing for laughs with other people, though, is rather fun; my personal favourite rule card from Zombie Fluxx is the one where players have to groan like a zombie at the beginning of their turn, and if they refuse/forget anyone else can pass over a zombie Creeper.

In a massively surprising turn of events, Monty Python Fluxx turns out to ramp up the silliness even more. It’s mostly based on the Holy Grail, with Goals like “Grail Shaped Beacon” (you win if you have Sir Galahad and somebody else has The Holy Grail) and the “One, Two, Five! (Three, Sir!)” rule (treat any “3” on a card as “5”), with a sprinkling of the TV series (a Nude Organist keeper, actions including My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels). A meta-game developed around two particular rules: one where you get to draw an extra card if you sing a few bars of a Python song at the start of your turn (and a second card if it hasn’t been sung before), and another where you get to draw an extra card if you speak with an outraaaaageous fake accent during your turn (you seely Eeeeengleesh kerrrrrrn-igggets), plus a second if you’ve kept the accent up since your previous turn. If there are two things I don’t need any encouragement for at the best of times it’s breaking in to Python songs and speaking with an outrageous fake accent, so I was trying to get those rules into play, and everyone else desperately tried to play cards to get rid of them as soon as possible (though not before a few creditable verses of the Spam song and Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life). All my singing was in vain in the end, as Jon triumphed by finding The Holy Grail, but I think it might have become my favourite card game ever. It’s just a shame nobody else will ever want to play it again…

The MMOnomyth

After Melmoth’s contemplation of Campbell’s monomyth, I wondered if the 17 stages could be adapted to be slightly more relevant to MMOGs…

  • Departure
    • The Call to Adventure
      • “Ooh, that bloke’s got shiny punctuation over his head”
    • Refusal of the Call
      • “Bugger off am I killing 50 wolves”
    • Supernatural Aid
      • “There’s a +1 Supernatural Sword if I do? Oh, all right.”
    • The Crossing of the First Threshold
      • “I’ve unlocked the Wolfslayer I achievement trait badge, score!”
    • Belly of The Whale
      • “WTF? Seriously, nerf the whale’s swallow attack!” (Note: that’s where the whale swallows the player, rather than the whale having small pet birds as weapons)
  • Initiation
    • The Road of Trials
      • “How much further have I got to run down this Road of Crap De-mounting Mobstacles?”
    • The Meeting With the Goddess
    • Woman as Temptress
      • “I don’t care if you are dancing in your underwear on the mailbox, I’m not giving you gold”
    • Atonement with the Father
      • “Sorry dad, I was too busy on this heroic adventure to tidy my room, but I’ll mow the lawn tomorrow”
    • Apotheosis
      • “Ding level 80!”
    • The Ultimate Boon
      • “Could it be that I hold in my very hand… The Sword of a Thousand Truths? It is so! No more powerful weapon exists in any earthly dominion! Huh. No point raiding ’til the next expansion now…”
  • Return
    • Refusal of the Return
      • “FFS, the questgiver is three maps away, I can’t be arsed to go back to him”
    • The Magic Flight
      • “Oh, wait, found a flight point!”
    • Rescue from Without
      • “Who called a dungeon boss Without anyway?”
    • The Crossing of the Return Threshold
      • “It’s 3am? Probably ought to log…”
    • Master of Two Worlds
      • “I have defeated Without *and* mown the lawn!”
    • Freedom to Live
      • “Your subscription has been cancelled as requested”