Killed in a Smiling Accident.

I was outraged while playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution to be subjected to a terrible bug. During a shoot-out I was pinned down by automatic fire emerging from a blank wall. Obviously there was an enemy soldier behind the wall shooting straight through it; were it was another player I would’ve assumed malicious use of a cheat, but as it was just the AI I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I was all set to make a post starting “Dear Sir, why oh why oh why oh why etc.”, but couldn’t let go of the right mouse button or I would’ve stopped hunkering down in cover and been shot.

On the off chance, I loosed off a few bursts of my own towards where the bullets were coming from, and was slightly surprised to see blood splatters, then the body of a solder materialise from thin air as his cloaking device failed. It wasn’t a bug at all, it was an invisibility suit; I wish the game had warned me, though that might’ve slightly reduced its effectiveness.

I should probably be thankful that the tactical decision of the stealthy enemy was to stand completely still in one place shooting at the boxes I was hiding behind (and equally thankful that those boxes, like all boxes in cover-based shooters, were conveniently packed with concrete, iron plates, kevlar and other composite armours capable of withstanding any projectiles short of an artillery barrage), as if he’d tried something as crazy as “walking around the boxes (while completely undetectable)” I would’ve been in trouble.

So it seems the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer is sadly going to be less Marx brothers focused, and more creating custom characters to fight on different and unique fronts in the war. That makes a lot of sense; as Jonathan B mentions in the comments Mass Effect (like the vast majority of RPGs) includes side quests aplenty, and we (like the vast majority of people who plays RPGs) have commented several times on the absurdity of wandering around a village/space station performing INCREDIBLY VITAL tasks like delivering packages, sorting out petty crime and trimming shrubs into beautiful topiary shapes while the WORLD(/galaxy/universe/multiverse) ITSELF is in MORTAL PERIL and there ISN’T A MOMENT TO LOSE.

Replacing optional side quests with optional sections from another character’s point of view that still tie in and contribute to a bigger story seems so obvious that some other RPGs must surely have tried it, though I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Half-Life does something similar with its Opposing Force and Blue Shift expansions seeing you take on the mantle of different characters experiencing the timeline of the original game, and occasionally crossing paths with the other protagonists. Steven Moffat’s Coupling used several unconventional narrative techniques to great effect, and they’d be well suited to something like the framing device of Dragon Age II, events being related by a not-necessarily reliable narrator. I suppose a significant problem is that structuring multiple simultaneous points of view is difficult enough at the best of times when you can precisely script the actions of all involved, give a player control and the complexity goes through the roof. It doesn’t really matter, so long as there’s a galaxy to save. But first, I’m just going to help Mrs Prodger complete her ornamental teaspoon collection…

The locomotive of my MMO enthusiasm has finally run out of steam, for the time being at least. The once huffing-puffing funnel is cold and still, and the roaring firebox –burnt out– now smoulders silently, where even a vigorous stirring of hype elicits nothing more than a gentle ember glow. As the running gear of my fervour slowly seizes, resistance to resuming my journey along that straight, bland, unchanging MMO track builds inexorably. A number of us are still keen on playing together, and as such we have all clambered like the Keystone Kops onto a single handcar, which we propel perilously down the MMO track, our arms flailing, but hanging on against all the odds nevertheless.

City of Heroes is the game we find ourselves enjoying at the moment, primarily, I feel, because it is one of the least MMO-like MMOs around. Oh, it still has all the standard MMO tropes, I grant you, but what it lacks is many of the border guards, barking dogs and machine gun posts of the traditional MMO regime, whose only purpose seems to be to stop you getting together with the people of your own kind, whose company you enjoy. CoH used to be excellent for getting a group together, now I would say that it is probably unsurpassed. I’d proffer that its whole purpose is to delight those who use it, but that would be inaccurate; its purpose is to be ignored entirely by those who use it. In short, City of Heroes’ grouping system works like this: invite people to your group, pick a mission, have fun. Everything else is taken care of. It’s the Jeeves of MMO group mechanics: useful, helpful, discrete, empowering, facilitating and, sadly, an incredibly rare find.

I tried to enjoy Lord of the Rings Online’s latest expansion, but outside of the absolutely stunning cosmetic items the new content provides, there’s nothing new there that excites me. If I were already chugging happily down the MMO track, then this would undoubtedly be solid fuel to keep the big wheels turning, but there’s simply not enough originality there to kick-start a seized and stationary locomotive of enthusiasm. I think I am, perhaps unfairly, disappointed that the latest expansion doesn’t really include any fresh system which drags the game in new and interesting directions: despite how players may feel about the skirmish and legendary item systems, they were at least attempts at something a little bit different. This latest expansion includes an implementation of phasing, a technology which Blizzard has already successfully proven doesn’t really work as intended, often breaking the immersion it is supposed to enhance, and sometimes inadvertently becoming one of the barriers to grouping with friends. I hesitate to say that this expansion was lacklustre, but to my mind it seems as though Turbine may be dedicating resources to their own Titan, because although they are clearly not neglecting LotRO, there just doesn’t seem to be the desperate drive to impress that was present in the previous paid expansion, as though LotRO will not be the flagship in Turbine’s fleet for much longer.

In the meantime I’ve switched tracks and find myself hurtling along in the game train, whose tender is overflowing with rich fuel. So far I’ve shovelled Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Space Marine, Gears of War 3 and Bastion into the firebox, and the pressure of choice was so great at one point that my boiler was in danger of bursting. I burnt through those games in short order, however, and now I’ve picked up the latest DLC for Dragon Age 2, because despite all the raging Internet forum complaints, I still found the game enjoyable enough to run through it twice. Mark of the Assassins has added Felicia Day, which is never a bad thing to my mind, or to the minds of the majority of Internet nerds, upon which I’m sure Bioware’s marketing department is relying. Somewhere in the recesses of Bioware Marketing HQ, a big tick is being slowly and firmly scribed with a squeaking whiteboard marker against the name Felicia Day, ensconced as it is alongside the names Jennifer Hale and Claudia Black, beneath the double-underlined heading “Voicerotica for nerds”.

It’s good to be back on the game train, something always worth doing from time to time: often, when you play MMOs exclusively for too long, you forget what the simple pleasure and satisfaction of playing a game actually feels like.

Fallout: New Vegas would make a great MMOG. Some tweaks would be needed; it starts well for a single player game, as you’re shot and left for dead. I say “well”, I mean it gives an immediate hook with good strong motivation to find your assailant, obviously the whole being-shot-in-the-head business puts a bit of a crimp on your plans for the day. As you pursue your shooter with the firm intention of giving the cheeky scamp a stern talking to, possibly even boxing his ears, you’re introduced to the other factions fighting for control of the Mojave, and the stakes get progressively higher (as befits a Vegas-oriented game) until your actions have deep and far-reaching consequences for the whole region.

A problem I found was the more important I became in the world-changing struggle, the less engaged I felt; I didn’t really want to have the fate of the region resting on my shoulders, but none of the competing factions seemed ideal ranging as they did from “evil murdering nutters” through “broadly benevolent (but still a nutter)” to “generally all right for the most part but a bit inflexible and perhaps a smidge too expansionist to really get behind (though at least not, so far as I can tell, nutters)”. I felt compelled, therefore, to seize power myself, for altruistic reasons rather than megalomaniac tendencies, but even then things didn’t quite work out precisely as I would’ve liked. Still, as Oscar Wilde said (when he was lead singer of the Stones) “you can’t always get what you want”.

It wasn’t as much of a letdown as Fallout 3, where I really felt railroaded at the end after a great start, I felt more in control of what was going on, but like the previous game, for me Fallout was most satisfying when more intimate, wandering around the wasteland uncovering desolate shacks, abandoned mines, communities barely scratching out an existence, or best of all the trademark vaults, underground bunkers built to survive the nuclear apocalypse, excellent places to shelter apart from the tiny issue that most of them turned out to be horrific psychological experiments.

That’s why it would be a great MMOG; after all they seldom have a single main story, more a series of areas, zones or dungeons, sometimes with linking threads but rarely as the main focus. I finished off the main New Vegas game, just to see what happens, then reloaded from a point before the final act kicked off and did some more exploring, and ran through the DLC packs. The structure seems like it would fit a virtual world really well, just lose the central plot and turn the players loose.

Fallout: New Vegas would make a terrible MMOG. The problem is that turning other players loose in the world would ruin it. It could support a few, no doubt; there are several companions you can join up with in the course of the game, with their own backgrounds and stories, almost like human party members (only far more obedient). Scale up to tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of players, though, and everything breaks down. A while back I suggested the Azerothian census would break down as “0.4% – Farming (livestock & dairy); 0.5% – Farming (arable); 0.8% – Innkeepers; 1.4% – Retail; 97.9% – The Chosen One Who Will Rid This World Of Evil. Slightly tongue in cheek, of course, WoW doesn’t really push your character as *the* Chosen One, but even when you’re not personally responsible for saving the entire galaxy, in the vast majority of games your character has a disproportionate effect on the world; as per another old post, “Over the course of Call of Duty 1, 2 and expansion packs, I’ve been personally responsible for wiping out approximately two and a half Axis infantry divisions, four armoured regiments and a few squadrons of dive bombers in the bits where you get hold of an anti-aircraft gun. By those measures, the invasion and liberation of continental Europe in 1944 would have required a total Allied force of twenty three people, and seven of those just to fill in when others had to go AFK for their tea.”

That disparity forces compromises in MMOGs like endlessly respawning mobs, instancing, and the generally unchanging nature of the world. Exploring vaults in New Vegas can be creepy, intriguing or action-packed (frequently all three), perhaps one was overrun and inhabited by a slaver gang, you clear them out, kill their leader, and report back to a nearby farming community that they should be a bit safer now. The impact would be pretty much removed if everything had reset the next day (or next minute), and you ran back through it again with four random people in the hope that the slaver leader would drop a nice item this time, but that would at least be better than turning up and finding players had been there six months ago, killed anything that moved and stripped the place of anything that could be carried.

In a perfect (virtual) world, those other players could have claimed the vault for themselves and set up a community there, that you could trade with, or join, or attack, but games structured in that way don’t really appeal. The *theory* is splendid, I find things like Ganakalicious’ Sandbox Challenge interesting, but the practise, so far, isn’t for me (“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”) Call me a rampant egotist, but I like being a superman, and the majority of single player games suggest it’s not just me. It doesn’t have to be at the “saviour of the universe” (ahh ah) level, I wasn’t so keen when New Vegas was really ramping up my personal significance to the region, but even down in local, isolated cases you’re pretty special; one man, up against an entire gang of gun-toting slavers, armed with nothing more than a pistol? (And a sniper rifle. And a couple of submachine guns. And a thermal lance for close up stuff. And a robot dog.) Just another day in the computer gaming office.

I’m not sure what the chances are for an actual Fallout MMO, with the protracted legal wranglings. I’m sure it’ll be worth a look if something does get released, but for wandering around a virtual world (albeit offline), it’s hard to beat Fallout: New Vegas. Especially with the fantastic Old World Blues DLC pack.

MMOG bloggers have a relationship with the games they play. Some are happily settled in a committed long-term marriage with a single game, others promiscuously flit from game to game, sometimes keeping several on the go at once. When a relationship ends it can be in a blazing row with suitcases of cosmetic items tearfully flung from upstairs windows and a lengthy series of mascara-smeared posts that reveal rather more about the psychological state of the player than the game; I like to think I’m a bit more considered. Hey, look, things aren’t really working out are they? It’s not you, though, it’s me. Well, maybe it’s you a bit. We had some good times, though, didn’t we? Let’s keep in touch, especially now you’re not demanding money off me regularly, maybe I’ll come back if it turns out that good looking new game doesn’t have much going on behind that attractive facade. Maybe if you added a few new tricks to your repetoire, that wouldn’t hurt. You know, like that thing that other game does that I really like? Or if you had a bit of work done, you’re looking a little tired around the edges…

OK, that’s getting slightly creepy, probably best back away slowly from that analogy now before otters get involved. Me and Lord of the Rings Online, though, we’ve been drifting apart for a little while. Nothing wrong on the part of LotRO, it’s still a top-notch MMOG with a lovely world, excellent variety of things to do and a good “freemium” price model, I was just hitting that point, as I’ve done a few times previously, where I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for killing ten things, or collecting five other things, or tromping through a dungeon to kill a boss who might drop a thing that two or three of the party need that if you win the roll for you can take back to an NPC to get a thing that was made obsolete by the legendary thing you got two levels ago… It’s perhaps slightly unfortunate timing, what with the Isengard expansion going live even as I type, but I get the impression that it’s mostly aimed at characters at the end-game, and I hadn’t even quite made it into Moria, the first of the three expansions.

Fortuitously City of Heroes is putting the FREEM! into “freemium” as it ditches mandatory subscriptions, and with a general sense of ennui in the Fellowship(s) it seems like a fine time to take some very sage advice and play Game Y instead of Game X for a bit. As City of Heroes was my first MMOG I always have something of a soft spot for it, and it was fantastic fun to get back into the mayhem of a team of eight flinging themselves into massive crowds of villainy, fireballs, radiation blasts and photocopiers being hurled with reckless abandon (and snooker tables) (and table lamps) (gravity control is a brilliant power). There’s a possibility that nostalgia is playing a big part and it won’t be a long term thing, like bumping into someone at a school reunion, having a fantastic time and arranging to meet up again, then slowly realising that you have nothing in common any more and there’s only so long you can reminisce about that time Cliffy Prodger drank seventeen cans of non-alcoholic shandy at the school disco, proclaimed himself “trollied” and ran around the hall wearing his trousers as a headband; why fret about the future, though, when there are photocopiers to fling?

I’ve been running World of Tanks as a Premium player for the past four or five months, a subscription-ish option that gives a 50% bonus to XP and credits at the end of each match. You buy in-game gold with real money, then buy Premium status (for 1, 3, 7 or 30 days) with that gold, so the exact price per month depends on how much gold you buy in the first place and how long you opt for Premium status. As with so many digital currency systems the more gold you buy the less it costs per unit, thus you can argue you’re saving money by spending more in the first place, but unless you have great self-control then the more gold you have kicking around the easier it is to succumb to the temptation of using it to just upgrade the training on a couple of your tank crew, oh and convert some into credits to fund a new tank, and heck why not buy one of those premium tanks while we’re here… You can use that as further proof of the Satanic corrupting nature of hell-spawn microtransactions if you really want, but it’s hardly different from picking up a kilogram bag of pistachio nuts instead of one or two smaller packs, convincing yourself you’ll just have a handful now and again, and winding up on the sofa that night with an empty bag, surrounded by shells, trying to use a remote control as a makeshift nutcracker to get into those last few nuts that didn’t open properly.

Keeping up Premium status (plus some experience conversion and the odd credit splurge) has cost me about £50 since launch, which is pretty reasonable with no initial box fee, especially for the amount I’ve been playing (1,500-odd battles so far), I certainly don’t begrudge what I’ve spent, but as the Premium counter ticked down at the start of this week and I contemplated buying another pack of gold to top it up I’d been thinking about pricing, and I decided to hold off and see how things work out as a completely free player.

I’ve generally been slowing down a bit anyway; after darting around various tank types over all three nationalities up to Tier IV or V I’ve settled on two main vehicles, a Russian Tier VII tank destroyer (SU-152) and heavy tank (IS), and a daily routine: get in from work, switch on Pointless (a rather fun BBC quiz show) and try and get one win with each tank. The game and quiz complement each other nicely; Pointless, like just about every quiz show bar University Challenge and Mastermind, drags everything out with jingles, rules explanations, deliberations over answers and awkward chats with the contestants, and each World of Tanks match starts with a 30 second countdown then a lot of cautious manoeuvring for position, unless someone goes a bit mental and heads straight for the enemy at top speed. The multitasking does break down occasionally; “Argh, I’m sure I can name the band most associated with each of those seven guitarists but I can’t quite place Thurston Moore just at this moment while I’m sorting out the VK3601 threatening our right flank”, but generally it works out. If fate is kind and I get a couple of quick wins with the main tanks without punching the screen in instant death and/or idiot team frustration I’ll move on to one of my lower tier elite tanks to earn a few more credits and free XP, then wander off to something else for the rest of the evening.

Lack of the Premium XP bonus means upgrades will take a bit longer, but with each tank needing something like 80,000XP to move on to the Tier VIII ISU-152 or IS-3 it’s hardly a short-term goal, “a really, really long time” doesn’t seem that much longer than “a really long time” according to international standards of vague durational estimates. I’ll probably get there, in a month or two, but in the meantime it’s just about the individual battles rather than the advancement. The lack of a credit bonus isn’t too much of a problem either, for now; I can lose credits in a bad match if my tank gets destroyed and I fired a bunch of shells with little effect (heavy calibre ammo is pricey!), but for the most part I at least break even with the main tanks, and the SU-85 earns a handy profit. I might need to revisit the situation with a Tier VIII tank as they’re even more pricey to repair and rearm, and I’ll probably have to look at turning some gold into credits to actually afford a new tank in the first place; I funded a good chunk of the IS by selling off a few Tier V and VI tanks I was hardly playing, and also discovered that when you upgrade a component like an engine or gun the old item is shoved in your Depot. If you go to the Depot screen there’s an option to list shells or equipment not compatible with your current tanks, so I took everything to a nearby car park had a massive Tank Boot Sale, haggling with old ladies over the price (“No, madam, that is an 8.8 cm Kampfwagenkanone 36 L/56 and is most certainly worth considerably more than three credits.”)

Overall I’m happy for the time being to keep plinking away in a non-Premium fashion, though I’m certain Wargaming.net will end up with more of my cash at some point if they continue their sensible pricing, either for upgrades in World of Tanks or when one of their new games comes along; maybe World of Warplanes but World of Battleships could really hit the spot. I mean a 3″ gun is all right, but a 15″ gun chucking the best part of a ton of shell over 20 miles, now we’re talking…

I’m not sure why I buy games on release day any more; the last two I got were Portal 2 (which I really must finish off sometime; what I’ve played so far is excellent, but for some reason it’s just never top of the list of “what I fancy playing right now”) and Deus Ex: Human Revolution (started it up, did a bit of the intro, blah blah blah dialogue dialogue, quit and went back to Fallout: New Vegas). It’s probably slightly unfortunate timing to be really into one FPS/RPG/OMG/WTF just as another comes out, but I’ve been hooked on Fallout: New Vegas for the past month or two.

You don’t even need to give it five years, picking up New Vegas in a Steam sale around nine months after launch allowed time for fairly extensive bug-squishing in a couple of big patches (though the game as a whole does just stop working and crash every now again on my system), and of course a hefty discount. I think the total for the game and three DLC packs was under £15; I feel a bit guilty as I’ve spent more than that on World of Tanks and, without wishing to denigrate the team behind World of Tanks, New Vegas is an entire game world with an overarching story with many paths, hundreds of locations to explore and massive amounts of recorded dialogue, whereas WoT is some tanks shooting some other tanks (gross simplification, and I’m still enjoying WoT and jumping in for a battle or two almost every day, but there does seem to be a bit of disparity there).

I’ve had my current PC for about two years now, without upgrades, and at one stage, in the dim distant past of the last millennium, if you had a two year old PC then you wouldn’t have much choice but to buy old games on budget releases, at least not if you wanted to nudge graphics sliders past the “monochrome stick men” option. That’s really not an issue now, my PC (pretty beefy when new, but not right at the top end) still happily runs everything I can throw at it, worst case scenario usually being running latest releases with “High” detail graphics instead of “Really, Really High”. I suspect much of that is to do with the majority of big non-MMOG PC releases being multi-platform; for Deus Ex apparently the PC only represented 13% of sales (57% 360, 31% PS3), and though that figure doesn’t include digital distribution a company would need a pretty major reason (like the prospect of monthly subscription fees) to go PC-only on a game if chucking AAA money at the production of it. With the 360 and PS3 getting on a bit, and no immediate prospect of replacements, developers have been pushing their limits for a while, and you can notice a few compromises in Fallout: New Vegas.

The New Vegas game engine handles the open spaces of the wasteland very well, and has no problems with interiors like casinos and vaults, but densely packed urban areas like the Vegas strip and surrounding town are partitioned into chunks by fences and gates with zone transitions between them. It’s not game breaking by any means, but it doesn’t help with immersion and is particularly annoying if you need to speak to someone as part of a quest. Fast Travel lets you (nigh-)instantly hop to any previously discovered location, but (unless I completely missed something) the only travel point for Vegas itself is the gate to the strip, so you fast travel there (…loading…) then go through the gate (…loading…) then through another gate to a different section of the strip (…loading…) then into a building (…loading…) to find the person you need to speak to, and of course half the time they have a couple of lines of dialogue then pack you halfway across the map again.

It’s not like New Vegas is a shoddy port by any means; the interface is bigger than it really needs to be on a PC screen, so it can be seen on a TV on the other side of a room, and it’s a minor inconvenience to have maps, quests and notes in different tabs of a screen rather than each having its own hotkey, but nothing to get worked up into an insane frothing Slashdot-comment/Digitiser’s Computer Boy type of rage over, even without mods the basic PC game is fine.

Speaking of mods, they’re a good reason to stick with PC gaming (along with using the only sensible control system, keyboard and mouse), and waiting a while after release before picking a game up gives plenty of time for modders to really get their teeth into it. I’m not using any mods for my first run-through of New Vegas, even though some could probably fix a few annoyances like the HUD scale, as you never quite know if you’ll wind up elbow deep in compatibility issues or problems with future patches, but once I’ve wrapped up the DLC I might well grab a bunch, or even leave it a while and come back to another play through to see what sort of a difference they make. I’m sure, as per Sturgeon’s revelation, there are plenty of half-finished well intentioned “quests” that only got as far as having an NPC approach the player and ask for help before running around in ever decreasing circles while performing the “use workbench” emote, free infinite-ammo nuke pistols of instant death and of course mod packs that perform the ever-vital game function of replacing every female NPC with a bikini-clad bint with improbable breasts. The user rating system and number of downloads should allow for decent filtering, though, and there do seem to be plenty of high quality mods for game functionality, graphics and content (once you’ve got past the “most downloaded” options that replace every female NPC…)

I’ve just started the most recent DLC pack, Old World Blues (currently my favourite of the lot, more on that after I finish it), which should keep me busy for a while longer yet, then I’ll need to get some new release to ignore while I actually get around to Deus Ex. Hmm, Skyrim Collector’s Edition for a mere £130, you say…

A story in the Wall Street Journal about sports bars showing Starcraft II games sparked major interest from television companies and bidding wars over the rights to other hot e-sport properties. Unfortunately I was off on holiday so KiaSA-TV missed out on some of the bigger opportunities like the grand World of Warcraft arena tournament, but nevertheless we’ve snapped up some fantastic events for the launch of our new MMOG-based television station. Here’s what you can be looking forward to this Autumn!

Tuesday Afternoon Arena Fights (1100-1300 rating bracket, EU Emberstorm Battlegroup): Although not quite so high profile as the grand prize tournaments there’s no end of thrills and spills in the hot ticket that everyone’s calling TAAFOTORBEEB. Can Rougekilla and Tyriondrizt keep up their incredible two win streak, or will Rougekilla’s connection time out when his sister tries to stream yesterday’s EastEnders? Will Stayplegun return from being /AFK before his team’s fight actually starts? Just how long can a conversation be continued using only the words “lol” and “noob”? Find out, in TAAFOTORBEEB!

Middle Earth Epic Book Transcontinental Rallying: The toughest endurance event in MMOGing, watch six rival members of the same party race between checkpoints (or “NPCs” as they’re sometimes called) being sent all the way across the world, and then all the way back again!

The Guild Wars High Jump Championship: Can anyone break last year’s record of 0.0cm?

The Champions Online 100m Dash: Three femtoseconds of racing followed by three weeks of legal challenges over whether radioactive spider bites count as performance enhancing drugs. Controversy still surrounds Doctor Timewarp’s claim of having won next year’s event last February.

One Tank And His PUG: Tanks from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland attempt to corral a skittish group around a dungeon by whistling a lot and shouting “kum bye”.

Fish’O'Mania: An all-action fishing competition where… hang on, no, that’s a real one.

Spinks was pondering NPCs in a rather fine post, and I’ve been quite firmly hooked by Fallout: New Vegas, a game with an awful lot of NPCs by necessity, being single player. I think it uses a combination of approaches that Spinks outlines; for the most part, for computational sanity, NPCs only exist when you’re around, a slightly solipsistic approach, though not quite as extreme as something like Saints Row 2 where things can stop existing if you stop looking at them. Some NPCs do persist, though, such as trading caravans that you’ll sometimes find at a particular outpost, or sometimes you bump into in the wilderness as they’re on the move.

The life of most Fallout NPCs isn’t wildly exciting, they generally wake up at a certain time, make their way to their shop/office/patrol area, sit at a desk or wander in circles for a bit, then go back to bed at the end of the shift. Fallout can get away with this as a single player game for a couple of reasons: you always have an option to wait for up to 24 hours, if you need to rapidly skip to a particular time of day, and NPCs are incredibly tolerant. Stroll up to a sleeping questgiver or shopkeeper, vigorously poke them until they wake up and you’d expect them to blearily peer at a clock and scream “What the hell are you doing in my house at three in the morning?”, or at least mumble “blargle glargle NO, ROY HATTERSLEY, GET AWAY FROM ME WITH THAT TIN OF KUMQUATS”, but they just stand up, nice and calm, and present exactly the same dialogue options as if you’d walked into their shop, a game/world compromise I can more than live with.

Even a few straightforward rules make the game world seem more like something that exists in itself rather than being an amusement laid on entirely for your benefit; a caravan of a trader with a couple of mercenary bodyguards follows a preset path, some bandits wander around a certain area, if the two bump into each other they fight. If you’re close enough you hear the gunshots, and you can either steer clear or go and investigate, help one side or the other, and most importantly sprint over to any corpse before it’s cold and strip it of weapons and armour. As the number of elements and interactions increase so you start to get hints of emergence; this can be a positive and interesting thing, like the Dwarf-eating carp of Dwarf Fortress, but when the game isn’t entirely glitch-free to start with it can exacerbate problems.

Near the start of the game I got on the wrong side of one of the big factions, and not long after I was wandering through the wilderness when four friendly (or at least neutral) markers appeared on the HUD compass heading right for me. It turned out to be a group of assassins, but terribly sporting assassins. I guess “being mown down in a hail of high-velocity rifle bullets fired by assassins half a mile away you had no chance of detecting” scored badly in focus group questionnaires, so instead the group approach and have a little chat; “Good morning sir, my name’s Geoff Assassin; assassin by name, assassin by nature as I always like to say, don’t I lads, ha ha ha. Now, our leader is a little bit miffed, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to assassinate you. Sorry about that. En garde!” I wouldn’t be surprised if I found a card when I returned to my rented room: “Sorry we missed you! A representative called around to assassinate you, but you weren’t in. We’ll try again tomorrow, or if you’d like to be assassinated earlier please call in to our depot between 9am and 5pm.” After the initial pleasantries they’re annoyingly hard to kill, but a couple of frag grenades proved most helpful and I resumed my wandering. They’re persistent blighters, though, and every few (in-game) days another group appear making a beeline for your character. I say “making a beeline”; they can interact with (i.e. shoot) things like hostile wildlife, traders or patrols from other factions if they encounter them on the way, and they’re a lot easier to deal with if you can shoot them in the back of the head while they’re distracted by something else. Sometimes, though, the rules go a little wrong; I’m not sure if they get stuck in a combat state with something else, or have pathing issues, or just forget exactly what they were supposed to be doing, but occasionally I’ll find a group of confused assassins milling around a small rock formation, completely ignoring me as I wander past.

Perhaps, though, that just makes the NPCs a little more human after all. I mean, were it an MMO, such actions wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for player characters; “The behaviour of the Legionary Assassin Squad in the field was erratic at best…“

A while back I took a quick run-through the housing options in some MMOGs over the years, something I’ve been thinking about again as I’ve just bought three houses. Well, one rented room, a house and a moonbase, to be strictly accurate, in Fallout: New Vegas, Lord of the Rings Online and Champions Online respectively.

I finally cracked on the last day of the recent Steam summer camp and picked up New Vegas and its first two DLC packs. News of a hefty patch with many bug fixes and performance improvements at the start of the month sounded promising, and an example of the benefits of the three (or indeed nine) month rule, though I’ve still encountered one minor glitch in a side quest that needed a bit of frinking to sort out. I really enjoyed Fallout 3, up until the end felt a bit rushed, and New Vegas is pretty much more of that, which works for me. I’m not very far into the game, not even having made it to the titular New Vegas yet, but I’ve just secured a motel room in Novac and that means I can get on with with my primary objective: exploring random locations and grabbing everything that isn’t nailed down (and if it is nailed down finding a crowbar to pry it loose); weaponry, clothing, food, medicine, scrap metal, pilot lights, lunchboxes, paint guns, detergent, gecko hide, shoes, lightbulbs, zeppelins… Then loading myself and a companion up with as much as we can carry, taking it back to the motel room and storing it in a cupboard in case it’s useful sometime, where it almost inevitably stays ’til the end of the game. Still, if there’s a quest objective that needs two pieces of ant meat, a packet of irradiated breakfast cereal, a souvenir dinosaur and a frying pan, I’m ready!

Over in Middle Earth I’ve only just got around to buying a house in Lord of the Rings Online. Again it’s largely driven by my hoarding instincts that make it terribly difficult to throw anything away, so having filled up the maximum 120 slots of my main character’s vault storage I decided it would be quite handy to get an additional storage chest in a house, and also have somewhere to put some of the bound furnishings that I couldn’t pass to Bank Alt #7. Each of the four races has its own housing area with a distinctive style so I took a bit of a tour, and it became apparent that the housing brokers have adopted the Budget Airline Airport Naming Scheme (e.g. Frankfurt-Hahn Airport, a mere 120km from Frankfurt); to get to the Thorin’s Hall housing you go out the main doors, down the steps, past the stablemaster and round the corner (via a couple of miffed goblins), and as for the Elven area in Rivendell West (nr. Duillond)… I picked out a Dwarven house in the end, ran through a couple of quick introduction quests that resulted in some furniture rewards, and settled in.

The LotRO furnishing system is a bit more limited than that of EQ2; you can select a texture and a colour for walls and floor, then place items in designated areas (e.g. Large Wall, Small Floor, Medium Sized Outside Bit). Fulfilling my primary goal of “offloading any furnishings I’d happened to acquire” has resulted in a somewhat eclectic decoration scheme that would be a bit weird even for Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen; one room features a frame on the wall containing the dress of the Red Maid (maybe that was taking “stripping the corpse of loot” a bit far), a freaky undead banner thing in a corner, and a single chair. The other room has a mouse-hole in one wall (with a large block of cheese in front of it) and a dead bear on the floor. I’d be worried by what the neighbours would think, if it wasn’t for the fact that it only rates about 0.4 on the weird-shit-o-meter of what LotRO adventurers furnish their houses with; I got groped by a tentacle the last time I was in the kin house!

LotRO houses are in their own instances, with multiple copies of the instance available to facilitate everyone having their own house without paving over the entire Shire. Combined with being stuck out a way from the main towns it makes the areas feel a bit like suburbia, and together with a widespread and efficient public transport service you get something that doesn’t quite gel with the setting. Homes generally feature in fantasy tales as somewhere to tearfully leave at the beginning of an epic adventure, or a place to run away from when you discover the magical heritage from your true parents, or somewhere that gets burnt to the ground resulting in a sworn oath of revenge. Rather less frequently homes are somewhere the protagonist commutes from; “oh fiddlesticks, I’ll miss the 8:17 horse from Bree if I don’t get a move on darling. Important meeting in Garth Agarwen today, I should be back for six o’clock but you know that Ivar the Bloodhand, once he starts monologuing you just can’t shut him up, I’ll swing past the provisioner on the way home and pick us up some tasty rations for dinner, mwah, mwah, see you later.” That’s not to say establishing a home never works, I enjoy a bit of a Robinsonade like the Swiss Family Robinson, making a place for yourself in a hostile environment, and that’s something well catered for in Minecraft or, in a more multiplayer context, Wurm Online as per Gank’s adventures. A more traditional fantasy example would be running a keep in Dragon Age: Origins – Awakenings, but that’s be harder to translate into a massively multiplayer setting; perhaps the role of mayor in a Star Wars Galaxies town captures the essence of it, and demonstrates how much harder it is to deal with human players rather than NPCs.

It’s just a game/world compromise, really, like using the dungeon finder in WoW (sit in an inn in a city *PAF* dungeon dungeon world-threatening evil stab stab stab *PAF* back to the pub), but domesticity seems to emphasise it. I’m happier at the “game” end of the spectrum, though, so I’m more than prepared to forgive the lack of immersion for the added storage and the ability to quickly travel around.

A base of operations is a much more fundamental part of the superhero genre (the Batcave, Avengers Mansion etc.), so when Champions Online introduced hideouts it piqued my interest and I popped in to take a look. I’ve kept the game patched up with the transition to free-to-play, logged in occasionally, but I keep bouncing off it. As per usual I had a quick look at my existing array of characters (the highest at level 20, many more not even through the tutorial) and none of them grabbed me, so as on several previous occasions I headed into the character creator and was in the middle of the usual hour or two of eyebrow-angle adjustment and trouser fabric selection when it struck me, perhaps that was one of my problems. I’d never had a particularly strong character concept, latching on whatever costume items and powers happened to catch my eye during character creation, and I mentioned in the previous post that the world (or at least the bits I’d seen of it) seemed a bit “generic superhero”, so I hadn’t gained much of an attachment to the characters from their exploits. Flipping that around, though, the relatively blank canvas is necessary to offer players such a degree of freedom with their character looks, story and powers, perhaps I’d do better if I started with an idea and built a character around it rather than the other way around.

A tremendous amount of thought came up with the incredibly detailed character concept, backstory and nine-voulume biography of “a sort of Steampunk type chap”, not really an exploration of the sociopolitical elements of the Steampunk subculture, more from the time-traveling asshole school of gluing cogs to stuff. The costume options presented a bowler hat and monocle (though PWI have clearly missed a trick, the latter didn’t even cost $68) as well as a suitable moustache for an ex-Hussar, with initial sword and pistol powers to fit (although the cosmetic sword options seem to be missing a nice cavalry sabre). Gadgets cover the more speculative elements, like having swinging as a travel power (employing the Fortherington Patent Pneumatic Fluked Travel Projector) and regeneration (the result of a most efficacious medicinal compound), and I’ve rapidly worked through the tutorial and emerged into the main city, an improvement on the original incarnation of the game that sent you off to either a desert or Arctic wasteland that I never really enjoyed.

Perhaps I missed it, I couldn’t find a button to activate the hideout menu, but via the old school method of a slash command “/hideout” did the trick (quite interesting in contrast to the controller-friendly nature of the rest of the game, like pressing a button to start conversations/interact with objects as opposed to having to point and click). There’s currently a choice of four: Mom’s Basement doesn’t really sound like the dwelling of my time travelling and/or parallel universe hopping Victorian (unless he’s putting it all on like the Blue Raja), and he’s a man of Science and Reason so the Mystic Sanctum is out. An Industrial Cave could fit the bill, but it’s got to be the Moon Base, get a bit of a Space: 1889 vibe going.

Learning lessons from the highly detailed but unappreciated supergroup bases of City of Heroes, the hideout is personal. It’s early days, with threads on the forums suggesting possible future functionality and canvassing suggestions, at the moment HMMB (Her Majesty’s Moon Base) Queen Victoria features only a tailor (always important to look dashing) and a crime computer. Design-wise there’s limited customisation, with a choice of lighting colours and two or three predefined options for the main furnishing points, no hero-crafted furniture of your own to place. I was a little disappointed by the view until I found the controls to open the blast shield, revealing the GIANT LASER!!! I’d selected in preference to some landing strips or the plain surface of the moon. It’ll be interesting to see where they take the feature, but it’s a positive sign that the game is developing with the move to free-to-play and change of publishers. It took several years before I finally got into LotRO, after all, so the lifetime Champions subscription might work out yet!