When stuck in a small cargo area with Zaeed, the Mass Effect 2 mercenary from the planet of Saaf Lahndahn with a strange eye, is it just me that starts to worry you might be trapped in a box with a cockney nutjob?
In Mass Effect 2 you can decorate your captain’s cabin with various bits n’ pieces like model ships or, quite splendidly, a space hamster (thus empirically making it the best game of all time). While shopping for these knick-knacks (and other less important stuff like weapon and armour upgrades) in the Citadel, every shop gives you the opportunity to offer an endorsement in exchange for a discount: “Hi, I’m Commander Shepard, you may know me from Saving The Entire Galaxy From Mortal Peril And Generally Being Brilliant, and this is my favourite store on the Citadel.” This seems like the sort of deceitful manipulation that would characterise a Renegade character, as not only is every single store on the Citadel your favourite, but you get to record your message before you’ve even glanced at what they’re selling let alone tried any of the goods to see what they’re like (“Geoff’s Emporium of Sex Aids, Cut and Shut Shuttles and Malfunctioning Weaponry? Oh yes, it’s my favourite store on the Citadel.”) Only it’s not. It’s the “Paragon” choice, apparently, netting you +5 Paragon points every time you shill. I haven’t tried the “Renegade” option, I’m guessing you strong-arm them into a similar discount, which at least would be a bit more honest. Speaking of advertising, while wandering around the Citadel it’s well worth having a look at some of the billboards, there’s a particularly excellent one for an all-Elcor production of Hamlet.
Anyway, after putting the finishing touches on your own cabin, there’s the small matter of the rest of the ship to decorate. Thanks to a slight misunderstanding (the original plans were metric, the new ones imperial) Normandy 2 is much larger than the first ship, driving your most vital mission…
“Look, Shepard, all this empty space is a bit of waste, so go around and find a bunch of amazing people to decorate it a bit, lean on bulkheads in a broody fashion and the like.”
So off you toddle around the most dangerous spots of the universe, assembling a crew of the amazing and powerful warriors…
“I will help you fight the Reapers!”
“Err, yeah, don’t worry about that, I’ve already recruited thirty seven other amazing people and can only take two of them with me at a time anyway. Could you just lean on that bulkhead over there for me and chat about your life history now and again?”
As predicted, the launch of Star Trek Online has been slightly overshadowed in KiaSAville by Mass Effect 2, which has both of us hooked at the moment. The ability to import your original Mass Effect character, once a staple of CRPGs (I remember taking a character from the slightly odd minigame collection Hillsfar into Curse of the Azure Bonds), is unusual these days, and really gave things an added hook at the start. I’d more-or-less forgotten the events of the first game, and didn’t think it would matter too much if I created a new character or imported an old one. I started a new character, as I’d heard that the game would let you make decisions on the key points of the previous game and was interested to see how that would work, but it seems that feature was removed before launch (RPS has a piece on it, including a link to a library of saves should you not be able to find yours, or want to bring in slightly different choices). After a quick run through the starting areas with the new character, I imported my previous character, and it was surprising how quickly it clicked as ‘me’, the character I’d got used to and all the decisions taken. Even early on I’ve bumped into a couple of people outside the main cast of characters who’ve recognised me, people involved in side quests from the original game who I’d forgotten until they wandered up for a chat.
There is something of the “inverse butterfly effect“, naturally; the differences in decisions you may have taken don’t change the major plot points. ‘My’ Shepherd had saved the council, the new one hadn’t, but that just meant a tweak in a line of dialogue from something like:
“After saving the council, they embraced humanity and gave us greater responsibilities”
to
“In the wave of the destruction of the council, humanity was able to play a greater part in their reformation.”
Even so, the imported character just felt more right than the default starting option.
Couple of other early impressions, I think I might have found my favourite party member from a line in combat when using his fire-based ability, something like: “Ah, flammable! Or, inflammable. Can’t remember which. Not important right now.” Also slightly disappointed that “bonus” suits of armour like the Blood Dragon and Collector’s armour can’t be customised in the same way as your main suit, which you can tweak the colours and pattern of. I was wearing the Blood Dragon armour for a while, and it looks pretty good (they’ve done a good job of making it fit into the setting), but when I sat down at the bar, ordered a drink, and promptly smashed the glass into the visor of the full helmet it did look slightly odd…
Anyway, time to play some more, there’s a galaxy to save!
I’m quite cross. About DRM. Which makes me even crosser, because I don’t want to be some ranting demagogue who goes around giving 1 star to Spore on Amazon. I’ve briefly outlined my DRM agnosticism before, obviously no DRM scheme is totally effective, but maybe they put a few people off, so long as I can get on and play the game I’ll overlook a few hoops which is all that’s necessary for evil (and/or DRM) to triumph. Well finally I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more.
Ubisoft have a new “Online Services Platform”. It’s an “added value platform“. And you’ll have to be permanently connected to the internet to play any game on it. Not just a bit of a check on startup:
What will happen if I lose my Internet connection when I play the game?
If you lose your Internet connection the game will pause while it tries to reconnect. If the Internet Connection is unable to resume you can continue the game from where you left off or from the last saved game.
Not to mention:
Can I resell my game?
Not at this time.
“Not at this time”? Being the system is only being rolled out in future titles, obviously you can’t resell them “at this time” because you can’t buy them in the first place. Also mysteriously absent from the Q&A list are more pertinent questions, like “You know it’s still going to get cracked in a couple of days, tops, right?” and “Are you fucking kidding?”
You might point out it’s not so different to a MMOG, you have to be connected to a server for those all the time, what’s the big deal? Two things: there’s a *good* reason you’re connecting to a server for a MMOG, like, all those other players, and if there’s a problem with an internet connection that’s the time I’d most like my other, single player games to be available. RPS links to a GameSpy piece that includes the line “While it’s hard to conceive of PC gamers being stranded without an Internet connection, those situations do come up, particularly when traveling.” Well it’s not *that* hard to conceive, is it, you managed an example right there. Tell you what, another example, just off the top of my head y’know, maybe your phone line goes down for a couple of weeks? Too crazy?
The only way this makes sense is if other companies have banded together and written Ubisoft a huge cheque to be sacrificial lambs, deliberate putting out the most blitheringly stupid DRM system they can think of on PC games they don’t give a stuff about so other companies suddenly don’t seem as bad. “Launch day DLC via in-box codes that can be redeemed once, so if you sell the game on the new owner has to shell out if they want that same content? Seems like a little bit of an underhanded way of making the second hand games market less attractive. Still, it’s no Ubisoft.” Any slight foibles Steam might have pale in comparison to a shade so light even Procol Harum are unable to suggest anything whiter, and that’s before it offers Psychonauts for £1.
If the Ubisoft Bloody Stupid Platform offers games for a quid, we can talk, until then I’m officially boycotting anything that includes it. That was going to be a bit of an ironic boycott, as a cursory glance at their upcoming games list didn’t reveal anything I’d been particularly planning to get anyway, but after clicking on a couple of titles to double check R.U.S.E. started actually looking quite interesting. It’d slipped under my radar ’til then, somewhat fittingly for a game about deception and concealment, so I now find myself in the slightly confusing situation of being interested in a game only because I’ve decided to boycott it (assuming it requires the permanent connection). Still, makes the stand vaguely meaningful, I suppose. Ooh, I feel like an activist now, someone get me a placard. “DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING!”
I tried Star Trek Online back before Christmas in closed beta and wasn’t too impressed; the space combat was quite fun, but the ground-based missions were really clunky. It was reminiscent of Auto Assault, where bombing around in be-weaponed cars was excellent but running around towns felt tacked-on and superfluous. When STO hit open beta and there was a certain amount of raving I thought I should take another look, so with broadband finally restored and two week’s bandwidth allowance going spare I grabbed the latest client.
I’m not sure if a strange inverse-nostalgia lowered my expectations to the point that not being physically poked in the eye was a plus, but the open beta seemed far better. Character creation was varied enough before, sticking mostly to the Star Trek “human with a bit of prosthetic work” alien option, and had been lightly buffed to a sheen with further options and a nice array of uniform elements. The only problem is it entirely ignores Star Trek canon and only allows your character to have two ears, and we all know that starship captains actually have three: a left ear, a right ear and a final front ear (sorry!) You get to enter a ship name along with a character name, though I’m not sure the more devoted Trekkie/er/ists would appreciate my Culture-inspired Lack of Gravitas.
The introductory mission was exactly the same tussle with the Borg as back in closed beta, bit of running around inside a starship, flying around shooting stuff, beaming down to a planet, but somehow left me wanting to keep playing instead of logging out after hitting the planet’s surface. Even though I’m not much of a Star Trek fan I could be tempted if there wasn’t much else on the go, but the SSV Normandy from Mass Effect 2 decloaking off the starboard bow I think I’m going to be a bit busy for a while…
Our industry insider has once again infiltrated the inner sanctum of an MMO developer and has sent us here at KiaSA Towers the lowdown on some top secret features that will probably never make it into production. This time its from the Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek Online design board:
Shatner’s Girdle: They just couldn’t find a graphics processor powerful enough to hold all those pixels in such a densely compacted space.
Malfunctioning inertial dampening: No matter how hard they tried to coax their physics engine to do it, it simply refused to throw the player characters in the opposite direction to each other and, more importantly, the ship.
Personal inventory: Have you ever seen a Star Trek officer with pockets?
Alternate (sic) dimensions: They couldn’t run the risk of you running into someone from another version of the game where players didn’t have to grind the same tedious missions over and over. Besides, they’d need to have space on the server to store an entire secondary set of your crew with pointy beards. And the female avatars looked really weird with beards.
Replicators: “One of every top tier epic equipment item in the game, please.”
Expanded range of phaser settings: ‘Oven left on at home‘ setting proved to be overpowered.
Tailoring: an early beta included a crafting skill that allowed players to produce cloth items with a machine on ship, but a number of problems prevented it ever working properly resulting in a slew of bug reports demanding the developers “Make it sew!”
Holodeck: This feature was going to allow players to create their own game content that other players could access through their ship’s holodeck. It was all going well, with various mini-games based upon Westerns, Nazi occupied France and fencing, until someone created a mini-game where your ship’s captain played a gamer who was playing STO on his computer. Alas this ripped a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum here in the real world, and Cryptic had to send a rerouted tachyon pulse through the game’s central database server in order to close that timeline down and set us off on our current timeline. Alas, in this timeline it appears that Tabula Rasa and Vanguard were utter failures, and Richard Garriot and Brad McQuaid are not the happily married benevolent rulers of Earth that they were.
The Computer:
“Computer”
*beedle*
“Run an analysis on this game’s data and make me a good game based on that data that isn’t entirely reliant on fans of the IP.
*beedle* “Estimated time to completion, three minutes, forty two seconds.”
“Send the result to my PC.”
Voice commands: Unfortunately players would just pick the mouse up and start talking into it, before moving on to shouting ‘Hello!’ in various and progressively louder ways. Alas, it was later discovered that Cryptic’s system ONLY… managed… to … pick up on… STRANGELY… intonated SENtences with pauses… IN… all the… wrong places entirely.
Rock Climbing skill: Players complained when the Vulcan science officer kept using crafted rocket boots to beat them to the summit.
Q: The first raid boss of the game was removed after an exploit was found whereupon he could be easily defeated with a simple script if your starship captain was a small bald Yorkshireman pretending to be a Frenchman. Later, after a fix was issued, a trans-dimensional bug caused him to issue players with weird gadgets like a shoe containing a radio transmitter and a watch that turned into a hedgehog.
Boldly: This was removed from the game when testers found that, due to a bug in the language, no players were able to boldly.
MMO players! With the sharp rise in Vitamin D deficiency, combat the risk of rickets by turning your monitor brightness up to a sufficient level to cause your body to synthesise Vitamin D.
Yours deficiently,
Mrs Vita Mindy
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that size isn’t important, it’s what you do with it. That’s all well and good, but if you want to be called massive there has to be some size requirement, right? Currently looking to measure up are Star Trek Online and Global Agenda, and both have a fair number of detractors looking at their tape measures and shaking their heads.
In Global Agenda, individual fights of 10 vs 10 obviously aren’t particularly massive, any number of online shooters can support similar or greater numbers on one map, but Massively, true to name, suggest how it does live up to the tag. Star Trek, like Champions before it, features heavy instancing, so while the overall player base may be massive you share your bit of space (or starship bridge, or planet) with a much smaller number that some people don’t feel is particularly massive, especially when Eve whops its 54,446 on the table next to it. Jon “Not Van Hemlock” Shute points out that it’s not so far off the multiplayer experience that consoles have been offering since XBox Live really took off.
Though much of the debate is around the “massive” aspect being lacking, I wonder if perhaps the “G” of MMOG is as much, if not more, of an issue. To quote myself (bad form and all that) from a few years back:
“Very loosely, by “game”, I mean something with fixed rules and objectives, and by “world” an environment in which you’re free to do as you wish. They’re more vague labels on a spectrum than concrete concepts.”
“Game” and “world” might not be the best terms, having different meanings to different people; you might prefer “theme park” and “sandbox”, but it’s not as if they’re rigidly defined universal terms either, GTAIV or Saints Row 2 are widely referred to as part of a sandbox genre, but pull up the city map of Saints Row 2 and it’s studded with activities and diversions, effectively theme park rides. There’s always “emotive term designed to make my preferred setting seem the only valid choice” and “emotive term designed to make my non-preferred setting seem foolish and pointless”, but that probably wouldn’t help matters; I tried using “splong” and “thrunk” for a while, but got banned from a couple of forums when trying to explain that I loved the developer’s splong but they really needed to get thrunking to increase the player base, so “game” and “world” it is (you could always do a find and replace with something else if you’ve got a fundamental objection to the terms).
Both these things are vital components of an MMOG: with no “game” then we’re in Second Life/Virtual World territory, though of course there’s heavy overlap, blurring at the edges and whole other debates over exact classifications there. The “world” is, to me, what makes MMOGs massive, massive in scope as well as in total number of players. One tends to come at the expense of the other, though; if there’s a castle somewhere with an evil overlord, at the “game” end of the spectrum you might get specifically sent to kill him, and you’d get your own instance of the castle to do that in. Moving more towards a “world” there might only be one castle, with an overlord who spawns on an hourly basis after he’s killed; further still, adding persistent elements, you might just happen across the castle while exploring, nobody would send you there, and once you kill the overlord he stays dead, it’s your castle now (at least until someone, or something, comes to try and take it from you).
Many players seem to move towards “game”-type elements, particularly instancing, when given an alternative as Melmoth’s Thought for the day picked up with the popularity of WoW’s cross-server LFD tool and LotRO’s skirmishes. Just about every WoW blogger I read gives the thumbs up to the LFD tool, and with a bit of mischievous exaggeration (or blatantly trollish flamebaiting) it’s not too hard to picture WoW’s cities as a lobby where the players wait to head off on their small group adventures. As a slightly earlier example, City of Heroes featured Hazard Zones, large city areas designed (I believe) for teams with no particular goal or quest to roam through, defeating whatever mobs were around; very few did, though, compared to the number of players running instanced missions, so hazard zones as such generally faded away, were redesigned, and didn’t appear in City of Villains. I’m certainly at the “game”ish end of things, I do like the grand stage that you don’t get with a single player game, but I want to get on and be doing stuff. I really don’t mind the model of Champions and Star Trek; a seamless world would be great, but if things have to be split up then I prefer the many instances approach to having fixed, separate servers, as for one thing it makes it easier to get together with many groups of people (like real life friends, comrades from previous game guilds and people who find you via the blog, who sod’s law will dictate are all on different servers, factions or indeed continents if they can be). Randomessa from Casual Is As Casual Does is similarly untroubled, and has an interesting theory about MUDding origins; I never MUDded myself, but I did start with the instance-heavy City of Heroes instead of Ultimate Online or Everquest, so perhaps it does have something to do with formative gaming.
The further you go towards the “world” end of the spectrum, the harder I think it is to get right for both developer and players. Player numbers and density are vital when they’re driving the action, obviously you need a critical mass to get things going but communities can be difficult things to scale, and with hardware capability being finite then too many players in a small area cause issues as seen, for example, in EVE; even if the hardware can support it, if combat is of a scale where an individual’s contributions are hard to measure it can be much less satisfying and lead to much grousing about “zergs”. Players need their own motivation, and a greater time commitment as the player has to fit in with the world as opposed to a game that’s fitted to the player. There’s obviously an appetite out there, Saylah at Mystic Worlds has a great post that starts “When I think MMO, I think of an open minimally instanced virtual world where players co-exist with infinite opportunities to interact with each other while carrying out game objectives.” The cupboard isn’t completely bare; EVE Online is the poster child for worldly games, Darkfall has similar aims for the fantasy genre but started out a bit focused on the unrelenting combat side of things to be really rounded (according to an EVE economic newsletter 70% of players are located in hisec space; mind you, starting out with a lawless frontier and gradually adding commerce and security has a bit of an Old West feel to it and could work, as opposed to starting with traders and turning a Mongol horde on them), Wurm Online and A Tale In The Desert both sound interesting, if not quite my cup of tea. There’s not so much in the way of AAA titles, though.
Rather than taking games for what they are, though, some people (most frequently found in the comment sections of news sites) get fixated on numbers. “Massive” means whatever number they’ve got in their head (100, 500, 1000, ONE! MEEEEEELEON!, take your pick), and if you can’t see that many people on the screen then the developers are morons who should be prosecuted for obtaining money under false pretences for calling their game an MMOG. What does it matter if you’re sharing a bit of space with 50, 500 or 5000 if you’re not meaningfully engaged with them? Van Hemlock’s Pioneer’s Tale is a beautiful eulogy to Backwater, a home carved out on an unloved planet on a new Star Wars Galaxies server, with a population in its most utopian stage of around 25. Size isn’t everything…
Day fourteen. The snow has finally been beaten back. Despite its seeming invulnerability in the face of the best efforts of humanity, it turned out to have a fatal weakness to common heat. Occasional heaped piles stage futile rear-guard efforts, but should be finished off soon.
The infrastructure left in tatters by the white death is not so quick to return, though, still no phone or internet. Apparently an engineer with a hoist is needed (I offered a variety of alternatives including stilts, several sets of garden jenga or a trampoline, but apparently none are suitable), and there’s a backlog of problems caused by the bastard sky ice.
I’d been hoping to take a look at the beta of Kung Foo!, but lack of broadband has driven me to a new diversion, utilising the eyes to gaze upon and interpret patterns printed upon cellulose pulp; I’m dubbing this “Singularly Individual Offline Printed Narrative Consumption” or SIOPNC (pronounced “see-oh-puh-nuck”), though some luddites seem to refer to it as “reading a book”. The single user instancing is absurd and clear evidence of lazy programming and backward thinking by these so-called authors who don’t even appear to be aware of the work of the earliest MUDs in terms of interactivity, though the graphics are similar. Still, it’ll have to do for now.
Luckily Christmas is a time of book-giving so I’ve got a few to hand; after finishing off the rather good Phoenix Squadron I’m now on Neal Stephenson’s latest, Anathem, which sounds a bit odd, but is incredible so far.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to primally scream into a hedge for a couple of hours.
Delving into the zeitgeist of the week, Brian Green’s got an excellent blog post up on The Innovation Paradox. Alongside Melmoth’s dictionary heroics I pondered the line “I think most thinking people agree that MMOs have evolved over time.” Obviously that’s “evolved” in the general “gradual change over time” sense, but I thought it might be fun to consider MMOGs in terms of evolutionary biology, an idea with only two flaws: firstly everything I know about evolution comes from flipping through Wikipedia for five minutes (this is how I know evolution is a quadruped with four legs, a heart and a beak for eating honey, which lives in large rivers such as the Amazon), and secondly any posting about evolutionary biology and innovation in MMOs tackles a ferociously controversial subject which almost nobody can agree on. And evolution (aaah, I confounded your expectations and from thence the humorous allelomorph arose).
Something that struck me from an Introduction to Evolution was:
“Evolution is not progress. Evolution is not “improvement”; it is simply change. These changes can be positive, negative, or neutral, depending on the situation. Evolution may seem progressive at times, because beneficial traits tend to out-compete less helpful traits under selection. However, evolution does not aspire toward any goal; there is no such thing as ‘backward evolution’ or ‘de-evolution’ because there is also no ‘forward evolution’ — evolution does not move in any particular direction.”
Change “the situation” to “the player’s perspective”, and that’s an interesting take on it. Obviously there’s an instant problem in that changes in MMOGs tend to be deliberate design decisions rather than random mutations (despite the theories of forum denizens about the number of monkeys and typewriters employed by dev teams), but as soon as you try and map that back to evolutionary biology then terms like “eugenics” and “intelligent design” start bubbling around and we have to deploy the emergency inflatable badger. Look everyone, a badger! Focus on the badger now! Look at the lovely badger!
Phew. Think we got away with that.
Another interesting snippet was about peacock tails. Evolution has resulted in big, flashy tails, despite the fact that they don’t instantly appear to help out in “survival of the fittest” stakes; they’re a hindrance if anything, but (and I paraphrase ever so slightly here, apologies for the highly technical terms) chicks dig the crazy feathers. I’m not sure if that works a parable for the importance of graphics in a game (people might say gameplay is king and flashy graphics aren’t everything, but… chicks dig the crazy feathers), but it’s kinda fun.
Then there’s role of environment; traits which are highly desirable in one set of circumstances prove catastrophic in another, typified by island birds that thrive with an abundant source of food and no predators but are virtually defenceless when predators do turn up. Has the landscape changed around the traditional MMOG as feral online consoles and browser games snap at its heels, and if so is it destined to become extinct like the Dodo, barely cling on thanks to conservation efforts like the Kakapo (hero of one of the greatest moments of the recent “Last Chance to See” with Mark Carwardine & Stephen Fry), or evolve a new defence mechanism?
Weaving in another strand, there was another excellent post on Vicarious Existence about the danger of nostalgia, which made me wonder if, in a hypothetical future where a very distant ancestor of the Kakapo had learned to fly to evade predators, you’d get a couple of them sitting on a branch reminiscing:
“Man, remember when we walked everywhere? That was brilliant wasn’t it, none of this knackering flapping business, why does nobody walk any more? Things were so much better in the old days, I can’t understand why it got much worse, let’s start walking again Geoff, come on!”
