Monthly Archives: June 2012

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness

In the eternal border skirmish between Genius and Madness Peter Molyneux is a gun-runner and mercenary with no qualms about supplying and fighting for both sides, often at the same time. Having left Lionhead to found 22 Cans his first new project is Curiosity, a cube that can be chipped away with one of three chisels that cost nothing, 59p and £50,000. Not only an exploration of the psychology and morality of monetisation (perhaps touching on the rather interesting points Richard Bartle raised about fairness in micro-transaction based games) but also, as Oscar Wilde would have doubtless put it, mad as a box of frogs.

Talking about the game and wider issues, a GamesIndustry article suggests “… there are examples of individuals spending far more in free-to-play games – one World of Tanks player invested almost £500,000 in a single tank.” Sounds a touch high to me; I’ve heard of similarly insane totals being bandied about in relation to Project Entropia, but never World of Tanks. Extensive and thorough research (30 seconds spent typing “world of tanks £500,000” into a search engine) didn’t turn up anything apart from the original article, and a deeply confused “Related Posts” plugin that decided people reading about footballer Rio Ferdinand might be interested in “World of Tanks Ferdinand weakspots”. Actually, that’s not a bad idea; make a note, Darling: play heavily armoured tank destroyer as centre back for England.

The most expensive tank you can buy in World of Tanks, on the EU/US servers at least, is the Löwe for (depending on exact amount of in-game gold bought for real money, special offers etc) somewhere around £40; even if you use gold to convert experience to qualify faster for a Tier X tank, convert gold to credits to buy the tank, spend gold on training the crew, buy gold cosmetic camouflage, fire gold ammunition and use gold consumables in every match while snorting gold dust as some kind of bizarre and entirely ineffective narcotic (don’t try and get high on unreactive metals, kids) you’re not going to dent half a million quid.

The economy of the game functions in a different way in other regions, so I guess there was some crazy one-off purchase somewhere else; the only other explanation I could think of (barring a major decimal point shifting error) is that a World of Tanks player, inspired by the game, went and bought an *actual* tank. I was having a bit of a poke around the MilWeb armoured vehicle classified ads, as you do, and at the time of writing Northeast Military Vehicles Services LLC have got a rather nice looking M18 Hellcat (Tier VI US tank destroyer in the game) for $469,000…

Fie sir, Fie sir.

Leopard, leopard, dazzling white
In these dungeons scant of light,
What designer’s hand or eye
Could frame thy hopeless comedy?

In those distant deeps you fought
A thousand deaths, my heals for nought.
Who struck from thee all circumspection,
And stuck me with thy resurrection?

And what humour and what wit
Would make a minion such a sh…ambles?
And when thy heart again does beat,
Why bounce straight off to thy defeat?

What programmer? What tool chain?
In what AI was thy brain?
What the devil? What the hell?
Dare thee pull that group as well?

Will thy maker ashamed confess
This parody of newb DPS?
Did He smirk His work to see?
Did He who made the Charr make thee?

Leopard, leopard, dazzling white
In these dungeons scant of light,
What designer’s hand or eye
Could frame thy hopeless comedy?

With considerable apologies to Mr Blake

I’ve quite enjoyed playing as a Ranger in Guild Wars 2, but I do wonder if the person responsible for developing the various aspects of the pets (especially the impossibly fragile snow leopard) was a healer in an MMO, and harbours a deep-seated grudge against DPS classes.

“LET’S SEE HOW *YOU* LIKE HAVING TO HEAL WAYWARD RECKLESS GLASS-CANNON DPS! ‘HEAL MEH!’ ‘HEAL MEH!’ IT’S NOT SO FUN NOW IS IT?! AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

And now to take another centimetre off the bottom of the human Mesmer’s starter dress; I’ve been doing it once a week for five years, and still nobody seems to have noticed.”

Kickstarter for the day.

See it as a penance for my time in Tera if you will, but I’ve donated to this Kickstarter on Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

And then donated a little more when I read about the harassment that Ms. Sarkeesian has suffered from certain select segments of our online culture.

As fellow gamers, I’d ask you to give it your consideration and pass the message on.

Thanks to Thade for raising the flag on this one.

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it

Without a single game to obsess over at the moment I find myself meandering around a variety of stuff for a “quick fix”, a 5 – 20 minute chunk of gameplay; sometimes I’ll plan for a couple of straight hours of gaming like an Operation in SWTOR, but that’s an exception rather than a rule. Chunks of gameplay can naturally chain together, the old “… just one more turn” of Civilisation, “… just one more song” in Audiosurf, but they’re meaningful enough if you only have half an hour to spare. Ideally there should be something longer term as well, whether it’s character development, levelling up, a story, unlocks, or just shooting for a high score. Without one or other, things tend to fizzle.

The Guild Wars 2 beta has no shortage of bite size chunks, you can hardly move around the introductory zones without stumbling over someone that needed a helping hand; I almost punched a farmer out when he started talking about hoes, but it turned out he was just after some gardening implements, he wasn’t commenting on the starting outfit of my Mesmer. It bodes well for release, but like I mentioned, the impermanence of a beta removes most of the longer term motivations. Apart from the really important stuff (i.e. hats) I’m not too bothered at the moment, though I ought to have a look at Wuvvuwhuuvwoo sometime.

Mass Effect 3 had one of its fortnightly multiplayer events, Operation Mastiff, which gave a bit of an added incentive to blast waves of Geth, Cerberus and Reapers. Each round lasts for 15-20 minutes which works out pretty nicely, and there’s a longer term hook in earning credits to buy equipment packs. Their randomness is getting a little annoying; much like the old sticker collections from school, the more you have, the faster the evaporation of the rush from tearing open a brand new pack when it turns out everything inside is a duplicate. I haven’t managed to find any of the new characters from the Rebellion DLC pack, or much useful permanent equipment, but I have got piles of shotguns I’ll never use… Still, such is the way of the RNG, so while I might quit in disgust at finding a Turian Soldier for the sixth time, I’ll be back at some point, feverishly tearing open another packet in the hope of finding the top half of C3PO. (I never did get that sticker in a packet or from swapping, I had to send off a stamped addressed envelope to complete the collection in the end…)

Star Wars: The Old Republic has a variety of bite sized options at the level cap. There are repeatable daily missions on a few planets, which do at a pinch, but I’ve never been a big fan of daily quests. There are the space combat missions, but as you fly along exactly the same rails each time they get repetitive very quickly; further tantalising hints of updated space content have been drifting out of E3, so there may be hope yet for a Something Very Similar To Jump To Lightspeed But With A Different Name To Avoid Trademark Issues expansion. My favoured option is the PvP warzones, 8v8 instanced fights with themes like “Kill The Dude With The Thing (Then Take The Thing Somewhere)”, “Click On The Thing (Then Stand Near It)”, and my favourite (and catchiest of all) “Click On A Series Of Things Then Swap Around And Stop The Other Team Clicking On Those Same Things”. As time goes on, though, these become distinctly less appealing as the disparity in gear, and thus power, between players becomes ever greater. It’s not unique to SWTOR, of course, most MMOGs run into similar issues; Funcom’s Craig Morrison recently posted to expand on a tweet responding to someone wanting gear parity in Age of Conan with the appropriate title of “The eternal PVP debate”. Ranked warzones and/or an increase in the level cap in future patches may help the situation, for now I’m taking a bit of a break; a while back I mentioned SWTOR warzones had generally supplanted World of Tanks for my daily drop in dose of screaming frustration (and/or triumphant victory), and Juzaba commented: “You know what the best thing about TOR pvp is? Your tier 6 tank is not repeatedly stuck in fights against tier 9/10 tanks.” Ironically, that’s a pretty good comparison for a modestly geared character going up against someone in full uber-deluxe PvP gear, so as the wheel turns, I’ve gone back to World of Tanks.

World of Tanks has the quick fix covered, battles take 15 minutes at the very most, usually less. There’s plenty for the long term as well, researching and unlocking new equipment and working up the tiers of available tanks, but I’ve more or less abandoned that side of things; levelling up gets pretty painful in the mid-tiers, that’s when spending money on a premium account or gold to convert experience can really help move things along, but I’ve got a garage full of tanks I’m happy with so I just roll them out for a round or two. It’s really just about the battles themselves, like the good old days of FPS deathmatches, with a bit of an added incentive in the form of persistent stats. There’s an Android and iOS mobile app available that shows your stats, perfect for chat-up lines down the pub (“Hey darling, check out my average Capture Points per match”), but one of its headline figures is your win/loss ratio, and caring too deeply about that is a sure path to insanity when it depends so heavily on the random people you’re dumped into battles with. Gank linked to a mod that displays an “efficiency rating”, which seems a slightly more sensible metric. I’m saving up the free experience, though, as the British are *finally* coming (in a couple of patches time, after some more made-up French post-war nonsense), when they arrive I’ll probably upgrade to a premium account again.

He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat.

Meanwhile in Guild Wars 2…

M’colleague found some cosmetic items in the Guild Wars 2 store, and seeing as we each had some gems in our wallets, we decided to try them out for style. You can’t deny that Charr look rather splendid in shades – m’colleague on the right hand side doing a fine impersonation of Ozzy Osbourne, I think you’ll agree.

But it was the hats that really topped the bill; I think I’m looking quite pimp, there on the left. Alas, they share the same cosmetic slot as the shades, and indeed can only be equipped in cosmetic outfit mode, which means that you can’t charge into combat while wearing a top hat as you can in at least one other game; well you could, but you wouldn’t have any armour or weapons available to you, so it would probably be a short, if fabulous looking, death.

Te-ra for now.

My time in Tera has come to an end for the time being, but I just wanted to make a quick post for all the dance fans out there. Here’s my Aman Slayer in the latest armour he’d been granted. Ooooo yeah. He just needs some fake tan and he’s all set to appear on Strictly Come Dancing, don’t you think? I’m sure someone somewhere thought it’d be fun to have Aman males look like they were the Hulk bursting out of a clown costume, but I have to say it wasn’t really a style that appealed to me.

<deepvoiceover>
“In the grim black darkness of the forest night, only one man stands against the forces of evil.

And he’s wearing a ruff.”
</deepvoiceover>

And for the squee zomg cute! fans out there: I already thought the Popori were a rather adorable race –although perhaps somewhat out of place set against the grim dark ruff-wearing races of Tera– but I think the zomgcute-o-meter almost broke a needle when I stumbled upon my first Popori youngling; reminds me somewhat of the Gibberlings from Allods, which is still the most deeply splendid concept for a playable race that I’ve experienced in an MMO to date.

I’ve definitely enjoyed my time in Tera, it was an experience worth having, and as Bhagpuss points out, there’s a trial to be had if you were interested in Tera but didn’t want to fork out for the full box price. However, I’m not convinced it’s the best way to showcase a game like Tera: the tutorial is fairly mundane, with very few, if any, of the game’s BAMs (Big Ass Monsters) to really let the combat shine, and using Gaikai’s streaming client means that the graphical quality is degraded far below the native client’s stunning resolution; perhaps better to wait for a free trial through the native client, for those who are still curious about the game.

I think Tera is marketed at quite a specific audience, and I’m not really part of that demographic, but I have to say I was still pleasantly surprised by some of the elements I found during my time in this curious and somewhat controversial game.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities.

From a PC Gamer article:

“Firefall’s world is made to be explored: there are few limits to where you can go. It’s an MMO built for those who see distant waterfalls, shadowy peaks and crashed ships and want to know if anything’s over there. Right now, in the early beta, there isn’t, much, but there’s enough to get an impression.”

Is it only me who wants to find something when I get there?

It’s one of those MMO development tropes which really bugs me: make vast swathes of landscape, slap a couple of vista viewing stations with suitable landmarks in the distance, and call it done. Then pop a fly-by on YouTube, preferably with a rousing soundtrack

Dun dun dun DUN DUN DUN “Here are some hills! Have you ever seen hills like these in any other MMO?” dun dun dum de dun DUN dum dun DUN dun de dun DUN “Here are some houses! In a village! AMAZING!” dun dum de dum de dum DUM DUN DE DUN “Now here’s a forest! Bet you weren’t expecting THAT! Look at the Speed Tree optimisation on those babies! A forest! A forest! Just like every other! But this one is ours!” dun dun dun dun DUN DUM DUNNNNNNNNNN DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNNN “Uh oh, here comes a fortress! WITH RAMPARTS! AND BAD GUYS!” OoooooOO! OOooooOO!

and call it done. Best. MMO. Ever. Hmmm? What do you do in this landscape? Well, there are some mobs scattered about. They stand there, staring longingly off into the distance, perhaps wondering if there’s anything interesting at the top of that cliff (there isn’t, we just thought a cliff would be cool), and you can, uh, run up to them and kill them and, y’know stuff. It’s details, we’ll sort that out later. Just enjoy the AMAZING landscapes for now. Bet you haven’t seen a landscape in an MMO before!

Like many MMOs before it, Tera was terrible for this (have we all done the Terable pun in our minds? Yes? Okay, good, let’s move on). The game was stunning to look at, breathtaking, but it was all stage dressing. There’s the occasional Kodak moment, where you are compelled to halt your grind momentarily, stare in wonder, and possibly line up a screenshot, but that’s all there is to it. I rarely think “I should go and explore over there” in an MMO, because I know that ‘over there’ will provide a disappointingly desolate experience, akin to looking behind the stage dressing and seeing the ropes and pulleys holding the set together.

I can’t see the point in making a virtual world to explore if there’s nothing to discover but scenery – I already live in a world with awe-inspiring panoramas, so what a virtual world should provide is the suspense, adventure and danger which I cannot find in this world, or do not wish to risk my life experiencing. When you say your world is made to explore, give me something more to discover than waterfalls and windmills.

Skyrim’s environments were impressive, both beautiful and accessible, but I wouldn’t have spent as many hours as I did wandering through them for the sake of the scenery alone, it was the jeopardy and adversity which I found along the way that kept me exploring. It was that association of adventure with both exploration and environment which made the experience so complete – locations and landmarks became significant because of what happened to my character there, no longer a simple part of the game’s world, they became an intrinsic part of my character’s world. It seems a simple rule, but one which is rarely followed in the MMO genre: make a game’s world the backdrop for adventure, don’t make adventure the backdrop for a game’s world.

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

It was a bit of a mixed weekend of gaming for me. I didn’t have much to do with the PC because it was mini-Melmoth’s birthday, and thus I spent most of my time building Lego models with her, and –along with Mrs Melmoth– playing various board and card games with her. I can heartily recommend Labyrinth as rather good fun, but would advise against Top Trumps if you too have a four year old who can evidently read minds or has x-ray vision; I lost more games of Top Trumps over the past weekend than my gamer fortitude can rightfully endure, and so I fully empathise with others when they express their torment in dealing with gaming losses.

Along with the birthday of the Infernal Queen of Top Trumps there was a double bonus super surprise fun holiday weekend here in the UK, so I had very little time to switch on the PC what with one family event or another to attend. I did get a spare moment or two on Sunday, and flipped into Tera to find that my box-included subscription time had expired, and I have to confess I was torn as to whether I should continue my subscription. I’ve flicked over to a couple of MMOs while I’ve been playing Tera, including the regular Friday night session of DDO, and none of them compare to the freedom I get from the combat in Tera. That’s not to say Tera’s combat is a revolution, there are still the same hotbar buttons to press, but the freedom of movement, nay the necessity of movement in order to stay alive, is something which I sorely miss when I return to the more traditional Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots style found in the MMO WoWpack. Tera also tweaks the traditional hotbar button mashing sequence with the addition of chained combo. attacks, which allows for a much more natural flow of attacks to be chained in quick succession; being knocked down and hitting the spacebar to trigger a leaping counter-strike, followed by another correctly timed spacebar press to immediately follow-up with an overhead slam, may sound simplistic, but it is the sort of addictive action-orientated style with which fans of beat ’em up games would easily empathise.

While pondering a further subscription to Tera, I patched Star Wars: The Old Republic and Rift, and did my customary login check to see if either was available to me, via a free weekend or such. To my surprise Rift did indeed allow me access, and a quick bit of investigation showed that I still had a week or so of my previous three-month subscription running. Maybe it was Tera’s action combat, or perhaps a general ennui with the genre as a whole, but I couldn’t find any spark of enthusiasm for Rift whatsoever. The wait-on-global-cool-down combat seemed ponderous, almost ridiculously so. The game was still as pretty as ever, but again, the incredible fidelity of a game such as Tera, whether you can stomach its design decisions or not, leaves other MMOs looking like so much aged tarnished brass. Rift’s soul system is, perhaps, the most frustrating part, a design which promises so much freedom, and yet delivers the same constrained-by-PvP ‘pick the useful abilities from the trash’ limited build potential that World of Warcraft’s talent trees always did. From the great potential that such a system promised, what was delivered was essentially a way to easily respec between traditional trinity roles, a step change over WoW’s dual spec. system to be sure, but still disappointingly bland – a soul system with no soul.

It’s so utterly frustrating because I really want to like Rift, I like the concepts which they have chosen to implement, but everything seems so formulaic and constrained. There’s no wild frontier, no trailblazing – they’ve followed the traditional paths through the design wilds, simply trimming back the undergrowth a little more, paving the way with stone blocks and posting road signs. It’s the same reason I probably won’t find myself subscribing to Tera or Star Wars: The Old Republic, for although there is trailblazing to be had, it is still just a few minor detours off into the wilds, before quickly re-joining the perfectly straight, perfectly smooth, perfectly monotonous routes which have been trodden for years, to the point that they are more Roman road than primitive path. I have no doubt that it is as much to do with my tiring of the tropes of the genre as anything, but it’s also born of the frustration that games such as EVE clearly demonstrate that this genre does indeed have the potential to encompass wildly different forms beneath the canopy of MMO, yet it’s still one of the few MMOs which forged a way into the wilds and never concerned itself with returning to the common path.

Of course deliberating over subscriptions is all moot at the moment, as my PC decided to trip the fuse fantastic last night and now refuses to even spin a fan. I’m hoping it’s just a power supply problem (and that it didn’t go Spartan and take the rest of the components with it), but for the time being I’m on an enforced MMO abstinence, and as such I’ll be catching up on my reading; as well as losing a ludicrous number of games of Top Trumps, I imagine.

Tis not too late to seek a newer world

Sometimes I find a book needs a bit of a run-up. Not literally, apart from perhaps those on the top shelf of a particularly tall bookcase when you don’t have a ladder to hand, more of a mental run-up; first time you try it you get through a few pages or a chapter, but it just doesn’t click. I read the opening pages of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver a couple of times, setting it aside in favour of other books, before finally getting over that hump, then never looked back over the course of the trilogy.

Bioshock 2 was a bit like that. I loved the first Bioshock, the sequel had been floating around my Steam library, I fired it up a couple of times, but somehow it never clicked until I gave it another crack recently. Only two years late to finish it! Maybe I’ll have a go at that Space Invaders thing everyone’s talking about next.

Part of the problem might have been how I was approaching the game, it took a little while to get into a mindset of not seeking perfection in every encounter, not worrying about long range pin-point accuracy with the early guns and desperately preserving first aid kits and EVE, but barrelling into combat and making liberal use of the ability to shoot lightning from your fingers (useful for shocking and damaging opponents, and also means you never need to worry about your mobile phone running out of charge). Though the world of Rapture has lost some of its novelty from the first game it still has superb design and atmosphere, the storyline picking up and complementing threads from the first game; it gets a little muddled at times, but that’s not entirely out of keeping with the general mood of decay, chaos and insanity.

You get a nice range of weapons and powers including a fairly standard shotgun and machine gun, and the research camera that provided such splendid combat paparazzi opportunities in the first game reappears, this time as a movie camera. Perhaps the most interesting new weapon is a rather visceral speargun that, combined with ragdoll physics, lifts splicers flailing through the air and pins them to walls. A bit Piranha brothers, though disappointingly there’s no “screw pelvis to cake stand” secondary fire mode. To rub lemon juice into the paper cut you can even retrieve the spear to replenish your ammunition stocks, causing the previously-pinned splicer corpse to crumple to the floor.

An unusual aspect of Bioshock 2 is the tactical options that you have for some encounters. In several cases you have the opportunity to prepare for a fight; gathering ADAM from a corpse, for example, you know will attract a horde of splicers, so before you start you can liberally sprinkle the area with happy fun surprises. Many of the weapons offer a defensive option via alternative ammunition types: trap rivets set tripwire-triggered bundles of delight, trap spears stretch electrified cables across passages, the hacking tool can deploy automated mini-turrets and proximity mines from the launcher are mines that explode when enemies are proximitous, which is lucky, as if they were cutlery trays that could hold only teaspoons they would be completely misnamed. Coupled with the Cyclone Trap plasmid and the ability to hack and co-opt initially hostile cameras and turrets, you can prepare formidable fortifications and stand laughing as waves of enemies are cut down by your defences, or run around swearing when you realise you completely missed a couple of avenues of approach.

Very much like its predecessor, I thought Bioshock 2 peaked a bit early; towards the end I had more money and ammunition than I could possibly use, so the last couple of levels were fairly cursory romps, clusters of frag grenades and heat-seeking missiles making short work of anything that moved. Overall, though, well worth persevering with.