Yearly Archives: 2011

Two things are infinite.

“Skyrim director Todd Howard told Wired.com in a phone interview Monday that the game will feature a never-ending stream of procedurally generated content, giving players an infinite number of things to do.

“The vibe of the game is that it’s something that you can play forever,” Howard said”

Unfortunately for players, it turns out that never-ending ‘procedurally generated content’ translates to Kill Infinity Rats.

Unfortunately for Bethesda, it turns out that those beta participants recruited from the MMO playing set completed the Kill Infinity Rats content in only four days, and were outraged that another infinity and half quests were not going to be available until the next expansion.

Have I Got MMOnews For You

Host: This week, teams, news that 6,000 copies of Modern Warfare 3 have been stolen in an armed raid. In a scene that could almost have been part of the game itself, “the robbery allegedly involved a fake car accident, tear gas and knives as the crooks walked away with games worth an estimated €400,000”.

Melmoth: The robbers were almost captured when they wasted precious minutes spray painting low resolution pornography tags onto a nearby wall. The criminals eventually made good their escape through ‘blatant hacks’, a police spokesmen said. The mayor of Paris called for an immediate investigation into whether the local police force were, in fact, lamers.

Zoso: Activision immediately took swift action, and released a patch to MW3 heavily nerfing both knives and tear gas.

Melmoth: Reports that the robbers escaped on a one hundred and fifty ton Brigantine flying the Jolly Roger, which they sailed around the Boulevard Périphérique to escape, are rumoured to have been entirely fabricated by the RIAA and MPAA.

Zoso: Blizzard are reported to be stepping up security around panda enclosures for the release of Mists of Pandaria in case of copycat (or copypanda) incidents; Bioware are less troubled and merely sending leaflets to drivers of Star Wars: The Old Republic deliveries telling them not to worry about plastic lightsabres (even if they have got powerful LEDs) and to ignore anyone in a dressing gown waving at them and saying “You don’t need to see my identification; this is not your delivery truck; move along”

Host: Goodnight!

Studio lights dim, theme tune plays.

Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people.

Here’s Sad Geoff. Hello Sad Geoff. Sad Geoff is sad. Why are you sad, Sad Geoff? Ah, Sad Geoff is sad because his friend Big Susan has just shown him a photo of a small rodent she found in the barracks at Isengard. But why is Sad Geoff so sad? Well, let’s have a look at the morale points of the rat shall we? 3066! My, that’s a pretty confident little rat right there, that little fella has drive and esteem to spare! What’s your morale point total, Sad Geoff? 105? Is that K? No? Just 106. Oh dear. Sad Geoff is feeling pretty inadequate right now, that tiny rat would surely give Sad Geoff a blarmed good kicking were they ever to meet. That rat is the feisty go-getting cocaine-snorting marketing rep to Sad Geoff’s poor grey engineer, stuck with implementing the impossible – due yesterday. Not going to be much help to the cause of the Free Peoples are you Geoff? Nnnno-sir. Perhaps you’d better hang up that bow of yours and get into a more sedentary profession, eh?

But wait! Big Susan saw that Sad Geoff was feeling pretty low, so she decided to show him something to cheer him up. Here’s the totem of a defiler orc, also from the barracks of Isengard. Let’s have a look at the morale points of the totem shall we? Six blimey hundred and dear me forty whole morale points for the totem there. I didn’t think it possible for Sad Geoff to become more sad, but finding out that there are inanimate sticks in Isengard that have over six times the level of motivation and confidence as Sad Geoff does, has made our erstwhile Hunter even more depressed: he’s hung up his bow and taken up haberdashery instead. Oh Big Susan, you’re a rotter.

Still, Sad Geoff doesn’t seem quite so sad these days, although that’s mainly because he refuses to stock any items with a greater level of self-worth and positive spirit than himself. Admittedly there was a dodgy moment a while back, when a new batch of zippers got a little too full of themselves, but Sad Geoff quickly smelted them all down into a bunch of moderately depressed button-flies; he keeps an eye on them though, because even now they’re still a significant threat.

Carry on Sad Geoff, you poor demoralised soul.

Adventure is hardship aesthetically considered.

Meanwhile, in Paragon City…

[Spinning KiaSA logo] Bannalananala Bannalananala naaaaaaaaa

City of Heroes continues to SOCK! and KAPOW! the pleasure centres of my mind with the improvements that have been made to it over the years, the foremost of which being the sheer unadulterated joy that comes from being able to hop into a group with friends, then straight away proceed to engage in activities both enjoyable and productive. City of Heroes delivers the fist of freedom to the jaw of arbitrary restrictions, and a further flurry of blows breaks down those traditional MMO barriers to grouping, such that when the dust cloud settles the players find themselves blinking into sunlight beneath a clear open sky, the last broken remnants of constraint’s walls crumbling to the floor beside them.

City of Heroes has always been a champion of freedom when it comes to group composition, but I find it admirable that over the years the game has evolved its powers further, enabling even great levels of liberty to the player population. This is a game which has found its Fortress of Solitude, listened to the advice it found there, and used the knowledge to become that much the better. It’s a shame that other MMOs persist in Batman brute-forcing their way through alone, ignoring this shining beacon of Ease, Happiness and the Multiplayer Way that has existed for many years within the same universe as they.

The changes to the Positron task force, however, present an interesting area for debate. On the surface it seems like a change for the better: the gruelling four hour chain of missions, which prevented players from undertaking any other missions until they had either completed or quit the task force (which could not then be rejoined once it was in progress), has been split into a pair of one and a half hour sessions, with far less travel and far more villain pummelling. The new task force is certainly enjoyable, and our group of players came away from it satisfied. But nobody will remember it. I imagine it’s a similar sort of situation to that which we find when considering games such as Dark Souls, where the experience is gruelling, but the memories quickly become rose-tinted and stick with one for far longer than, say, those of a game like Dragon Age 2 ever would.

Synapse, Manticore… I struggle to remember the names of the other task forces, but Positron… Positron has been etched with an optic blast into my MMO soul, such that I still draw in a sharp breath at the mere thought of it in its original format. Perhaps it’s also something about that first dungeon in a game: ask me to think of instances in World of Warcraft, for example, and images of the Deadmines spring to mind quickly, shortly followed by Gnomeregan; I struggle to remember even the names of the dungeons that came with the Burning Crusade expansion. Certainly the Positron task force is now a more pleasant and manageable affair, but I do wonder if we lose too much in our games by removing all the Punishers and replacing them with Jubilees.

Reviewlet: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution feels properly “Deus Ex-y”, but that’s a double edged sword as startling innovation from ten years ago can be old hat now. Back then, for example, the idea that you might not actually be a noble anti-terrorist agent but a pawn for shadowy conspiratorial organisations was pretty novel, whereas in DXHR the presence of the Illuminati is marginally less shocking than the tutorial informing you that the WASD keys move you around. Adam Jensen, the central character of DXHR, has mirrorshades and a gravelly rasp heavily reminiscent of JC Denton, but though JC sometimes had a bit of trouble expressing emotional intensity (“A bomb!”), Jensen is a full-on charisma-vacuum who drones through every conversation in a monotone with an emotional range spanning the full gamut from “mildly disinterested” to “slightly miffed”. Perhaps memory (via rose tinted mirrored glasses) is being kind to the original game, or the writing was better, or the novelty of a voiced protagonist made up for clunky delivery, but it seems a much more glaring flaw in DXHR; as Charlie Brooker tweeted “If any film starred a character as rubbish & po-faced as this Deus Ex prick, audiences would hurl shoes at it.”

What saves DXHR is the gameplay, equally solid whether sneaking, hacking or shooting your way around. Again demonstrating its heritage, you tend to come off second-best in a straight up firefight, especially towards the beginning of the game when lacking an arsenal of upgraded weapons and sub-dermal armour. I remember having terrible trouble at the start of Deus Ex, coming to it from more straightforward shooters, blithely running around the starting level trying to shoot guards while sprinting, running out of ammunition without managing to kill anything and getting pummelled. DXHR therefore offers a similar plethora of routes and options through its levels. Some require augmentations to take advantage of, such as the hacking skill to open a door (via a mini-game) or enhanced arms to be able to pick up heavy objects blocking routes or even punch through walls. The tech tree of the augmentation system works nicely to let you specialise in a particular approach, from improved hacking skills to quieter movement or even a (brief) cloaking device.

If you choose to fight it out there’s a wide array of weapons from non-lethal shock guns and tranquilliser rifles to the staples of pistols, shotguns and assault rifles, with more exotic laser and plasma rifles later in the game, and a few varieties of grenade if you prefer chucking stuff. Avoiding confrontation involves a lot of crouching; I’m not generally a fan of stealth gameplay, especially if it involves ten minutes of analysing camera movement patterns and guard patrols and automatically failing the level if you get spotted, but it’s most enjoyable to sneak up behind a guard in DXHR and hit ‘Q’ for a satisfyingly crunchy takedown (lethal or non-lethal, depending how kind you’re feeling), and if you do get rumbled then you’ve still got options to run, hide, or pull out a plasma rifle and melt anyone who comes to investigate.

Even Jensen’s growl works; in lengthy dialogue sequences he might sound like he’s trying to bore the other party into unconsciousness (maybe his augmentations have made him too perfect as an infiltration agent and conversations are just a different sort of non-lethal takedown), but when out running missions he has a more of the Man With No Name about him, delivering the odd laconic aside but otherwise letting his actions do the talking.

Of course there is a bionically-enhanced fly in the choose-your-approach ointment: the boss fights that even Eidos admit were a mistake, when sneaking goes out of the window (or, more to the point, sneaking is unable to go out of the window, because there are no windows, air ducts, hackable doors or other alternatives). Forewarned is forearmed, though, so after seeing numerous tweets and comments I’d equipped myself with the Typhoon Explosive System augmentation (description: “Deals enough damage to kill all living targets”), which made the unavoidable fights as tricky as running up to someone and pressing “F2” (and sometimes pressing F2 again, if they were inconsiderate enough not to die the first time). Tiny spoiler: there is a later boss who you have to fight without the benefits of augmentations, which turned out to be just the sort of special occasion I’d been saving up a grenade launcher for.

I enjoyed DXHR enough to explore every level methodically, usually punching, stunning or shooting (depending how kind I was feeling) all the guards, hacking anything hackable, then working backwards through any air ducts or lift shafts (the exits are usually more obvious than the concealed entrances), but that did mean it got rather samey as it went on. It probably wouldn’t have been quite so obvious if I’d varied the approach a bit as I’d gone through, but despite the globe-spanning plot you wind up going through lot of strangely similar corridors with strangely similar grilles over conveniently human-sized ducting, evading (or shooting) strangely similar guards and hacking in to strangely similar computers (with the computers, keypads and alarms sharing the same mini-game that’s diverting enough to start with, but not deep enough to sustain that much interest). Maybe it’s a comment about increasingly homogenized globalisation (aaaaah!) The two city hubs are the highlights, with more scope for exploration and side missions, but if you thoroughly explore everything in one playthrough there’s very little replayability. The story is on rails; the first game was as well to an extent, forcing your hand at certain key moments, but it felt like you had more decisions to make on the way, whereas the extent of the choice in DXHR seems to be whether a couple of characters live or die, without a major effect on anything else. It’s fine to keep the action moving but never particularly engaging, not least due to Jensen’s dullness.

Overall a good game, not groundbreaking like the original, but solid enough fun. Deus Ex: Human Revolution gets the coveted KiaSA “Probably Worth Buying in a Steam Sale” award.

He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

Betrayed and turned over to the orcs of the White Hand, we find our captive heroine transported to deep within the fiery orc-infested dungeons of Isengard. Will she survive the hardships of the dungeons? Can she rescue her fellow captives? Will she find a way to break her bonds and return to the surface to warn the advancing Rohirrim? Find out in this week’s exciting episode of A Warden’s Adventuuuuuuuures in Duuuuuuuuuunland!

“Orright ya filfth, we’re gonna get ya t’working, *hard*, until that pretty white elf flesh is all flll… uh?! Burr… where’d they go?”
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[Back at the Prancing Pony in Bree]
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“So you just used your milestone teleport?”
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“Well it was just sitting there and off its cooldown, seemed almost rude not to.”
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“Huh. Another pastry?”
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“Ooo, rather!”

Tune in next week for more exciting adventures in… A Warden’s Adventuuuuuuuures in Duuuuuuuuuunland!

A splendid attempt at storytelling in Lord of the Rings Online’s recent epic book content, somewhat spoiled by the fact that the diverse nature of an MMO means it’s hard to restrict the player as you would in a single player game. Whipping the player’s character off and locking them in a dungeon –from which they have to escape over a period of many quests– would be fine in a single player RPG, but in an MMO the developer has to give consideration to the fact that the player might want to go and play with their friends in the interrim.

Either that or Turbine simply forgot to turn off teleport travel skills.

I didn’t actually teleport all the way out, just tried the skill and the induction happily began, as my captors stood around watching me reading a map and muttering my incantations. If I had managed to port out, I do wonder how I was supposed to get back in to complete the epic story content, which itself leads to further considerations…

“NEXT!”
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“Morning Grotsch!”
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“Back again, elf?”
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“Yes indeed, thought I’d drop in, y’know, undertake a few more steps of my escape while I had the time.”
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“Orright, you know the way, down the hall, first tur…”
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“First turning on the left. One cell each. Yes, I remember. See you in a bit!”
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“Whatever. NEXT! Morning human. First time in the dungeon, or returning?”
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[Deep in the prison…]
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“I WILL WORK YOU UNTIL YOUR BONES ARE GROUND TO DUST. I WILL…”
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“Oh, lor! Sorry, but I’m going to have to stop you there.”
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“HUH?”
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“Just look at the time! I’m late for my mid-morning dungeon telecon! Sorry, terribly sorry, but I’ll have to take a rain check. I’ll be back later, yah? We can resume our session then.”
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“Awww, but I woz jus about to reach the culminashun of me monologue! Iz got a grate bit about ‘the tortured remnants of your soul will rot in the shackles of oppression’ an everyfink.”
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“Oh, that does sound truly wonderful, but I really must dash, darling. We’ll pick it up next time, I promise, and I’ll pay full attention to your monologue then. Mwah. Mwah.”
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“Bah, fine, off ya go elf.
YOU! OOOMAN! COME ‘ERE! I WILL FLAY YOUR HIDE UNTIL I CAN PLAY CHESS ON YOUR BACK. I WILL…”
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[At the prison entrance…]
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“Cheerio Grotsch, see you next time!”
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“Jus don’t ferget to clock out dis time!”
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“Oh deary me, I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t pinned on with leaves! There we go. Ciao!”
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“Gerroff wiv yer! Bloody elves.”

Still, at least I’m finally finding entertainment in Turbine’s latest expansion – just in all the wrong places.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious

July 14th 2008, Melmoth asks “Where is my BattleTech MMO?”

Looks like we finally have the answer, and it sounds rather promising. “Online”, “free to play” and “proper MechWarrior game in the tradition of MechWarrior 2 through 4” are phrases that earn the KiaSA Stamp of Approval (just as soon as I’ve finished carving it from this potato here).

Not a vast amount on the official site yet but you can reserve your pilot name, so if you want any variant of “Steiner”, “Davion” or “Kurita”… bad luck, by the time you read this “D4v10nnNnSst31nn33rKur1t44442351097230” will already have gone. Anyone else might want to pop over and sign up, though.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

If you haven’t already read Cynwise’s deeply splendid look at the Pandaren and the influences involved, I’d highly recommend you do so.

Stemming from that post is a link to Samwise‘s gallery which includes concept images of the Pandaren, and which upon closer inspection also gives hints –to those who may be interested– as to a couple of possible appearance options for the female of the species.

Specifically here, here and here.

I particularly like the Conan-ian appearance in the image above, possibly with a tagline of: “Don’t think of me as a clownish Po, think of me as Iorek Byrnison wearing a goddamn Batman mask.”

For I am ready to halt, and my sorrow is continually before me.

It seems that every mob now stuns during combat in Lord of the Rings Online’s Rise of Isengard expansion. I can’t begin to describe how annoying and pointless this feels.

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What? Oh yes, well, I suppose I could at least try.

My experience with combat in this latest expansion has been one of general annoyance. I’m wondering whether my frustrations are the result of the change in how character stats work, such that my character has yet to accumulate enough newly itemised gear in order to get back to the level of power she once enjoyed. I do know that Wardens are also suffering a little in this expansion (admittedly it’s the sort of suffering the Sultan of Brunei would experience if he found he’d lost a five pound note), something of which Turbine is aware and intend to address in a forthcoming patch. Regardless of my class-specific woes, the number of misses, evades and parries my character experiences when in combat with basic, even-con mobs, has reached quite tiresome levels. The peak moment of heroism was last night, where my character snuck up carefully behind a stationary guard, took careful aim at point blank range, and then powerfully launched a javelin into the ground at the guard’s feet, with my character presumably smacking their forehead on the up-ended spear shaft with the momentum of the follow through. While my character staggered around clutching their head, the guard –after he’d managed to stop laughing– understandably decided to retaliate. Of course what actually happened was the words EVADE popped up on my screen, and I wondered what level of martial arts training this hillman had undertaken to be able to dodge a javelin thrown at his back at point blank range while he was seemingly oblivious to my character’s presence. And then I started to wonder why these supernatural ninja warriors hadn’t already taken over the lands of Middle Earth.

Do I need to talk about the giant slugs which can parry my attacks? I mean, is it really that hard to define an inheritance class of mob, called slug, with the Has_No_Blarmed_Chance_Of_Parrying field set to TRUE? Or perhaps it’s just an indication that it’s time to sharpen the ol’ sword, when a slug successfully uses an eyestalk to perform a parry and counter-riposte to your attack.

The reason for noticing all these niggles is that I’m constantly given time to contemplate them mid-fight, every time an enforced pause is foisted upon me. I’ve mused on the stun as a mechanic before, but the ironic situation is that every time I’m stunned in combat I’m simply being given yet another opportunity to mull and fume over the fact that there’s nothing to do when I’m stunned. Every stun is now a short advert break for how annoying stuns are. Quite frankly I’m seriously considering that this is all just a prelude to Turbine slipping in adverts for the LOTRO Store during the intervening period.

[STUN!]
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Slug parrying getting you down? Visit the LotRO Store today and pick up a Slug-Be-Gone salt shaker legacy for your legendary weapon of choice, only 250 Turbine points!
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We now return you to your regularly scheduled grind…

What is the point of the stun? What?! Kif, I’m asking you a question! In the past I imagine it was a numbers game: someone, somewhere, had a spreadsheet which showed that if you halted play for two seconds every fight, and added all the delays over all the many many fights in which the player would engage, that you could add another day or two to the /played time for a character, which when multiplied by a healthy number of subscribers would probably equate to a second kidney extension to the CEO’s swimming pool.

In a free-to-play game the point becomes more about the fact that it’s unavoidable and, barring the odd class with a long cooldown ability, unbreakable, therefore I have no control in this; it enforces the realisation that, at any point, the game could simply choose to win, and therefore the only reason you experience victory at all is because the game lets you. It doesn’t add any level of peril, because most fights are never anywhere near the level of challenge where a stun might stall your defence for long enough that the mob could kill you. And even if it did, even if the mobs were clever enough to whittle your health low and then pop a stun and finish you off, what of it? All that shows is that the only way for the game to win is to STOP YOU PLAYING YOUR CHARACTER… If you really want me to stop playing your game, just say, I’ll go and find another one. Stuns like this, used consistently and for no tactical reason, are just one of those supreme examples of blasé thoughtlessness that we often see in MMO combat design.

Or so it seems. I’d be very happy for someone at Turbine to explain the stun mechanic to me, to outline why it adds anything to the combat, anything at all, except for extreme annoyance and frustration and downright hair-tearing incredulity on the part of the player. Alas, my only –admittedly cynical– hypothesis for an explanation so far is something along the lines of “This is the sort of tedious trite crap we’re going to be pulling over and over again at the end game, so we thought we’d get in there early and build up your tolerance to it”.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Now what would be really interesting is if, say around 20.12.2011, World of Warcraft announced that it was going free to play.

Lord of the Rings Online was still offering standard and lifetime subscriptions right up to the point that it announced it was going free-to-play; getting your most ardent fans to agree to sign-up for a year mightn’t be a bad plan if you were going to open the game up to all, for ‘restricted content’ free play at least.

In addition, a forthcoming expansion which, potentially, could be seen as specifically targeting a younger audience, might work better if the subset of younger players who couldn’t normally afford a regular subscription were able to play for free, and then pay smaller amounts for the combat pets, mounts, and other items they were interested in.

Now, if World of Warcraft were to add a cosmetic item system, something which has already proven incredibly lucrative in a game such as LotRO, then you might consider it as further evidence that an in-game WoW Store was a distinct possibility, and free-to-play often goes hand in hand with an RMT store.

Of course, realistically you’d expect Blizzard to test the RMT waters first, perhaps with a small vanity item that could be bought with real money and then traded on the game’s auction house to other players, as a finite controllable experiment.

Don’t take this as some sort of proclamation as to what I believe is going to happen, but it is an interesting thought experiment to consider whether –what with the recent decline in subscriptions of their aging game, along with a core audience which seems dissatisfied no matter what they do– Blizzard would entertain the idea of opening World of Warcraft up to the pocket money demographic.