Category Archives: wow

Skip to the end.

One of the earliest and most popular AddOns for World of Warcraft was a simple little LUA script that made the quest text appear instantaneously instead of scrawling its way line-by-line across the screen in an achingly slow fashion, as though being received in real time from a Morse code operator on the other side of the world and then translated behind your screen by an arthritic octogenarian who was two-finger tapping it into a teletype interface. This AddOn was simple enough on the face of it, but it instantly broke a part of World of Warcraft’s quest system; any pacing of content that the Blizzard team had planned based around the fact that players would have to wait for, and therefore probably read, the quest text was nullified as the majority of players voted with their AddOn folders and chose to be able to click ‘Accept’ before the NPC had even had the chance to inhale a breath in order to speak. The standard motto for MMO questing became ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever’. Later this evolved into ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Stick the objectives in my tracker’, and later still — ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Stick the objectives in my tracker and mark where I need to go on my map’.

One assumes that, given a few more years, it will eventually become ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Why don’t you go and kill the ten rats and bring them back here to me, and then you can just give me the reward’. It seems to me that there’s a perverse trend in the evolution of the genre, where we’re slowly and inexorably taking on the role of the NPCs. Next we’ll be running around desperately trying to give quests to any NPC that we can find, watching them run off and come running back to us, whereupon we hand them a reward; even that will be too much like hard work though, so we’ll eventually get to the point where we simply log-in to our character who stands stationary and waits for an NPC to come running up and ask for a quest. Groups of players will gather together and form camps or villages or towns, and our game will simply consist of logging-in, standing around and doing nothing while NPCs speak to our characters to gather quests and collect the subsequent rewards. We’ll have optimised our game-play time into the absolute purest essence of effortlessness.

True story.

The thrusting point of all of this, if you could call it such, it’s more like being poked gently with the blunt end of a large marrow, is with regards to Bioware’s fully voiced MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. I imagine the point has hit home, probably because I’ve not so much poked its soft marrowy hide gently at you so much as clubbed you brutally around the head with it. Alas, marrows never were a subtle instrument of enforced learning.

To wit: Bioware is spending quite a lot of money and effort on voice acting talent, these are resources that could be spent on other things, say, for example, game-play content, and all evidence points to the fact that the majority of players in MMOs want to ‘skip to the adventure please’. Case in point: the reason for my thinking about this was due to my recent play through of Dragon Age: Origins; this is a game where all the dialogue has voice-over, but at the end of each segment of speech, when you inevitably have to respond with a dialogue choice, Bioware sensibly places on the screen a text version of the sentence the NPC has directed at you so that, should you miss the spoken question, you can read back over what was said and answer appropriately. I would assume that Bioware will do something similar for TOR, and of course what this means is that you have instantly created a way for players to ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever’ their way out of it. The problem with voice dialogue is that it is easily as ponderously slow as the tip-tapping octogenarian of Blizzard’s original quest text interface, because to provide any sort of immersion with voice acting you need to have dramatic pauses and drawn-out inflections and character defining twists and turns to the speech, otherwise you end up with a bunch of robotic NPCs all alike, as though every quest hub was a franchise of some quest awarding super-conglomerate, “Hi, welcome to Questbucks! What can I get you?”, “Thank you for buying from McQuestalds. Have a nice day!”.

I think the Esc key (oft used to skip dialogue in Bioware games) will become the most overused button in an MMO. Even in Dragon Age, where I don’t have the peer pressure of a party of several other players all waiting for me to get through the dialogue so that they can “GO GO GO!!1” and get on with their game, and where I want to immerse myself in the world that Dragon Age presents, I find myself yawning every now and again and, as Zoso said to me when we were discussing it last week, “sometimes I find myself thinking ‘Summarise, man, summarise!”. Don’t get me wrong, the voice acting in Bioware games is always most excellent, and fantastically immersive in most cases, but it is a thing that is utterly at odds with the direction that the general MMO play-style has developed. Perhaps Bioware’s game will be the next jump in that evolution, something so at odds with what is currently taken to be the norm that it takes the genre in an entirely new direction, or perhaps it will be a lot of wasted effort on the part of Bioware, effort that could have gone in to making a better and more expansive game. The pacing of voice-over in a game can sometimes appear ponderous even to a player invested in the world of a single player RPG, I just hope that Bioware have taken in to account the inbred impatience of the itinerant MMO player.

In summary: do you think that mice would evolve the ability to wear lederhosen if they were slapped on the thighs on a daily basis?[1]

1. Yes, I think they probably would. Shall I go and slap ten mice for you?
2. Are you mad? You can’t slap mice, it’s against the religion of the land!
3. Ah ha! I’m working for the Mouse King, and now your plan is revealed. Prepare to die!
4. I like cheese. Do you like cheese? Mmmmm, cheese.

[1] This is here just to freak out all those people who skipped the main post text to get to the dialogue question at the end.

Innovation in World of Warcraft.

heroic [hi-roh-ik]
–adjective

  1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a hero or heroine.
  2. suitable to the character of a hero in size or concept; daring; noble: a heroic ambition.
  3. having or displaying the character or attributes of a hero.
  4. having or involving recourse to boldness, daring, or extreme measures.
  5. dealing with or describing the deeds, attributes, etc, of heroes, as in literature.
  6. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the heroes of antiquity: heroic mythology.
  7. used in heroic poetry. Compare heroic verse.
  8. resembling heroic poetry in language or style; grandiloquent.
  9. (of style or language) lofty; extravagant; grand.
  10. larger than life-size: a statue of heroic proportions.
  11. (in World of Warcraft) quotidian; apathetic; perfunctory; mundane, e.g. heroic dungeon.

Why it’s the very dictionary definition of dictionary definition innovation.

Folly is the cloak of knavery.

The healer of our static group in World of Warcraft was otherwise detained last week and so I took up the healing mantle for the evening, a garment that I am very comfortable wearing, although I was given again to muse upon its curious properties.

The healing mantle, for those who are unaware, is an impressive item of clothing which provides an aura of invisibility to the wearer rendering them utterly anonymous to everyone else in a pick-up group. It is well known that tanks are indestructible self-healing marvels, and that DPS can sustain continuous damage, be it from AoE or by standing in pools of molten rock, without so much as putting a hair of their perfectly sculpted bouffant out of place. Everyone in your average pick-up group is a marvel of robust and rugged constitution. All four of them.

Until one of them inevitably dies.

It is at this point that the healing mantle activates its primary systems and transforms. First it disables invisibility and instead turns itself a really offensive shade of fluorescent yellow. Secondly an underpowered motor jerkily raises an electric sign on a metal pole from just behind the healer’s shoulders; coming to rest several feet above the healer’s head, the sign consists of an arrow pointing down at said head and the words “THEIR FAULT” all in buzzing flickering neon. Finally a pair of integrated loudspeakers rotate from their resting place, lock into position on the healer’s shoulders, and repeatedly squawk a distortingly loud siren alerting all the other players to the healer’s presence. All attention is generally focussed on the healer at this point and bent on determining exactly what they were doing skulking away at the back of the dungeon while these other four were valiantly fighting the good fight with nothing to keep their health bars topped-up but the aura of sheer magnificence that they project; sadly they weren’t magnificent enough to facebutt their way through the two groups of extra adds that they pulled, but that’s not the point. Thank goodness, though, that the healing mantle was there to alert them all to the traitor in their midst!

Thankfully the healing mantle is deactivated when playing with friends or other competent people – these folk seem to project a damping field which prevents the mantle from obscuring the efforts of the designated healer – so I’m happy to report that my turn as healer the other night was a suitably happy and stress-free experience.

Being fifteen levels or so above the dungeon content probably didn’t hurt either.

Thought for the day.

The scary thing isn’t that Blizzard have opened a micro-transaction store for World of Warcraft; one should consider that event to be as the emotive theme tune is to the shark in Jaws, or a dissonant violin crescendo is to Jason Voorhees.

It’s a warning, but not a guarantee, of the actual horror waiting to strike.

The audience sits gripping the arms of their chairs and each other, or peering through fingers, all the while willing in vain that the innocent band of plucky wallets and purses turn back from the strange path that they are following lest they are caught by the monster that stalks them and have their innards sucked out.

Everyone holds their breath. And waits…

Blizzard’s pet theory on microtransactions.

[To the tune of Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl]

This was never the way I planned, not my intention.
I got so brave, drink in hand, lost my discretion.
It’s not what I’m used to, just wanna try this ‘con’.
I’m curious it’s true, caught my attention.

I bought a pet and I liked it,
The waste of my would-be paycheck.
I bought a pet just to try it,
I hope my guild mates don’t mind it.
It felt so wrong,
It felt so right,
It don’t mean I’d buy more tonight.
I bought a pet and I liked it,
I liked it.

What can I say? They went for my Pandaren weak spot and scored a critical hit.

Thought for the day

As Blizzard’s “make the shoulders bigger, add more horns and spikes” theme reaches its apogee in Tier 10, it’s obvious why a Cataclysm is needed: either they’re rebooting the armour sets before the “upside down Weeble” look goes too far, or all the doorways in the old world are going to be massively enlarged as part of the rebuilding effort so that characters can fit through them again.

Warcraft’s Tier 10: Horny Edition.

It’s always hard to tell the rumours from the facts with World of Warcraft, but seeing as this sneak peak comes from The Holders of Truth themselves, I guess it’s good.

Well, I say good…

Unhorny Here’s the Warrior Tier 10 helmet and shoulders on a Dwarf, I like the way that the helmet horn, even though it’s sheared-off halfway along its length, still clips nastily with the shoulder armour. Always classy to have your items clip horrendously in the most basic character model pose.

Bet it looks great on Blood Elves and Humans though.

Still, could be worse, you could be a druid.Horny What did your mother tell you about eating all those apple seeds? You’d get apple trees growing out of your ears, that’s right. Those do look more like rose bushes though.

Looks like Blizzard will have to update their collision detection code for this next patch so that they can correctly simulate all these Druids stumbling into stationary objects.

Me So HornyAnd finally let’s all take a moment in thought, a little quiet contemplation, and give thanks to the developers for giving all those Hunters a giant pseudo-phallus sticking out of their forehead to reflect how they are perceived by a large percentage of the World of Warcraft population.

I’m sure they’re all going to love that.

Behind the stage curtain.

Sometimes, be it through error or happenstance, we players get to see behind the stage presented to us by the game we are playing. Sometimes it’s a very literal behind the scenes look, and other times it’s less obvious or impressive. Nevertheless, these opportunities can give the curious a sneak peek at some of the game mechanics that are otherwise hidden from view.

One such mechanic that I run across in WoW more frequently these days is per-area mob (de)spawn. Basically there are areas where, given no traffic for some time, the mobs in the area are despawned, and they dynamically respawn whenever a player enters the area. It’s hard to determine if this is a general mechanic or only for specific areas, for obvious reasons: the amount of time Goldshire isn’t populated with “Oh thee verily thy forsooth methinks” types or bouncing PvP lolbots is probably close to zero, whereas other areas rarely see much traffic.

One of these places is in a starter area, it’s a little out the way within the starter area itself, and when I tell you that the starter area is Bloodmyst Isle, backwater birthing zone for the Draenei race, an area which itself is tedious and unnecessary to journey to for any character who doesn’t have a specific reason to go there, you’ll understand why this place has little to no traffic for large spans of server up-time.

Blacksilt Shore is a small area tucked away in the far south west of Bloodmyst Isle; there is only one quest that ever sends you to the area, although there is another quest to be picked up from a frequently spawning named mob, another mechanic that Blizzard seemed to get especially excited about and used frequently in the starter areas released in the Burning Crusade expansion, but never seemed to take much further than that. Anyway, if you approach Blacksilt Shore from Kessel’s Crossing by swimming across the small expanse of water that separates them and then run along the shoreline, if no other players have been there for a while (which seems fairly common on my server) then you’ll notice the phenomenon that huge clumps of Blacksilt murlocs suddenly spawn out of nowhere at single points in the water as you run past, and then all move off in different directions, generally populating the area which was otherwise empty a few moments before.

Not terribly impressive I grant you, but one of those things that – if you happen to be the sort of person who is looking for it and is curious about such things – can probably be considered QI, if nothing else.

Next week: The little known but more mundane bug where an oiled-up Jaina Proudmoore can be found naked pole dancing for Thrall.