The Scene: a dungeon which carries the sign ‘Ye Olde Tombe of Peril’. MOUSEBENDER, an adventurer, enters and confronts an AXIOMATIC HORROR.

MOUSEBENDER:
    Good morning, foul spirit.
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Good morning, sir. Welcome to the Tomb of Peril. What can I do for you?
MOUSEBENDER:
    Well, I was rather hoping to purge the dungeon of the foul spirits that infest it, and perhaps perform a spot of light ransacking for a little financial renumeration in the process.
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Oh, I see. I suppose you’ll be wanting to kill me to death, then?
MOUSEBENDER:
    I’m afraid so. Nothing personal!

MOUSEBENDER stabs the abomination with a rapier.

AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    I’m afraid you won’t get very far with that, sir, I have damage reduction from piercing weapons.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Oh never mind, how about a +2 mace?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    I’m afraid it’ll need more than +2, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Tish tish. No matter. Well, fiendish creature, I have an acidic greatsword here!
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Ah. Acid immunity, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    It’s not my lucky day, is it? Er, Gwylan’s Blade with sonic damage?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Sorry, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    +1 Light Hammer of Pure Good?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Normally, sir, yes. Today I’ve got a special resistance.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Ah. Giant Stalker’s Knife?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Sorry.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Weapons of Kobold Bane, Muck Bane, Goblinoid Bane, Elf Bane?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.

MOUSEBENDER throws another four useless swords from his backpack to the growing pile on the floor

MOUSEBENDER:
    +1 Ghost Touch short sword, per chance?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.
MOUSEBENDER:
    You can be harmed, can’t you?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Of course, sir. If you …
MOUSEBENDER:
    No, no, don’t tell me. No spoilers, I haven’t looked this up on the wiki.
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Fair enough.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Er, something Axiomatic?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Yes?
MOUSEBENDER:
    Ah, splendid, good job I found this in an earlier chest!

MOUSEBENDER sets about the abomination with a +1 Axiomatic Bastard Sword of Backstabbing, despite lacking the weapon proficiency.

AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Oh, I thought you were talking to me, sir. I’m an Axiomatic Horror, that’s my name, and if you’d succeeded in doing any damage up to this point that would have healed me.

(pause)

MOUSEBENDER:
    +2 Metalline scimitar?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Ah, not as such.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Er, Flametouched cudgel?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.
MOUSEBENDER:
    That figures. Predictable really, I suppose. It was an act of purest optimism to have tried the weapon in the first place. Tell me:
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Yes, sir?
MOUSEBENDER:
    Have you in fact got any weakness at all?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Yes, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Now I’m going to ask you that question once more, and if you say ‘no’ I’m going to shoot you through the head. Now, do you have any weakness all?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.
MOUSEBENDER:
    (shoots him through the head)
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    You’ll need to use Holy Bolts for that to work, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    (logs out)

Let’s hope the launch titles continue to show this same innovation; I’m hoping for “PlayStation Move Sports” including Skittles, Badminton, Wiffleball, Karate (But With Punching Only, No Kicking) and Something That’s Really Similar To Golf Except I Can’t Think Of A Good Example Just At The Moment (With A Knob On The End).

In a statement for Oh MMO Emo News, the US gaming community expressed its continued commitment to extra storage capacity within the Russian developed MMO, and as such their target for next year is to get extra slots for everyone, rather than having to share those two slots among the entire US population.

Reporting live for Oh MMO Emo News, I’m Melmoth Melmothson.

Turbine doesn’t abuse the device either because although I’ve run quite a few dungeons in DDO now, I would say that I’ve encountered the tile puzzle in less than a quarter of them. It’s certainly ripe for abuse however, one could see it surreptitiously slipping its way into daily life, where poor adventurers are forced, in cross-legged desperation, to rotate ceramic floor tiles between themselves and the toilet in order to unlock the lid and be able to relieve themselves, and where many a divorce proceeding in Stormreach was begun after a toilet seat was discovered locked in the up position.

I wonder why we don’t see more of these sorts of puzzles in MMOs, is it simply a case that they’re too cumbersome and time consuming to implement with respect to the amount of content that they provide, or is it more the fact that the generic MMO player is not really interested in such distractions and would prefer to just get on with grinding away at various NPCs, unimpeded by the need for any real cognitive exercise beyond that which muscle memory alone can quite happily provide? Judging from the general reaction to the mini-games present in Mass Effect 2, which I thought were harmless entertainment where many others seemed to perceive them as the fiery soiled undergarments of Satan, these basic mini-games are seen by a great many players as being vapid at best. I can’t help but feel that there’s something to them though, that perhaps more puzzles can be incorporated into MMO games in order to tax the player in more ways than the, admittedly tried and tested, option of pressing hot bar keys in response to various external triggers during combat; in fact I feel that MMOs, with their ponderous and often drawn-out style of play, lend themselves quite well to the incorporation of such diversions.

I expect part of the problem is the fact that the puzzles need to be kept simple so that the maximum number of players will stand a chance of being able to complete them, but perhaps a shift in how the puzzles are used to ‘block’ content could be undertaken such that more complex and advanced puzzles could be used without unduly punishing those players who don’t care for them. For example, a locked door to an optional treasure room could be pickable by a Rogue, but the same door could also be opened by solving a complex puzzle game. A basic example, of course, but it also opens up some interesting lines of thought, such as the fact that the player’s presence in the game would then be represented not only by a set of numbers that define various abilities, but also by the abilities of the player, where a player’s character within the game would then be an amalgam of both their in-game skills and those of their real-world self. There’s also the fact that puzzles are often used in team building exercises because they are a good way to foster communication and cooperation between strangers, so having group based puzzles within an MMO might be one way in which to encourage people to play as a team, rather than the more usual social phenomenon found in MMOs where they play together as individuals.

Anyway, I’ll have to leave you with those thoughts as I’m rather desperate for a wee and there’s a bugger of a Pipemania puzzle to complete before I can get into the men’s restroom; I’d claim that they’re taking the piss, but more accurately they’re diverting it through a network of interconnected rotatable tiles.

The cause for my thinking upon this was the fact that Lord of the Rings Online now seems to have two independent systems of experience gain that run in parallel, one that gives this burst of experience, with the other giving the more traditional steady and reserved progress, where playing the game is more the focus of things. LotRO’s skirmishes give really quite generous experience the first time you run them each day due to their having an automatic daily quest associated with them that boosts experience and token gains; running the four skirmishes open to my character at the moment can net the best part of half a level for little more than an hour’s play, something that is much harder to do with standard questing due to the travelling involved in getting from the quest givers to their objectives and back again. The fact that I can get this boost of experience from the skirmishes means that when it comes to the standard questing I don’t feel as though I’m stuck in some sort of Travelling Salesman Problem, where I need to optimise routes such that I don’t waste precious time retreading old ground, I can sit back and relax and enjoy the questing and exploration of the land knowing that I’ve made a significant amount of progress in getting to the next level already.

World of Warcraft provides this sense of progress by creating islands of experience, those small self contained areas of questing, never more obvious than in the Burning Crusade expansion where each experience island slams jarringly into the next with little feeling of worldliness about the place, as though each zone were a floor of a department store; and just as you could have the department store’s elevator doors close on a view of cheese counters and meat selections, only to open on the jarringly contrasting sight of women’s lace underwear and silk nightgowns, the zones of the Outlands similarly contrasted with one another in a curious and unworldly manner. It’s possible that it’s this partitioning of progress into pockets with such obvious delineations that caused the theme park feeling, which in turn caused people to ignore any pretence that there was a story or adventure to be had, and realise that the whole questing game was really just paddling through waves of highs and lows in order to be able to catch the ultimate endorphin rush and ride the raiding wave back to shore.

Lord of the Rings Online has always attempted to focus on story, it being based on an IP that constantly lurks in the background angrily waving a placard with “Keep Including Story, Stupid!”. The various ‘book’ content that progresses the player character’s own tale in LotRO is intertwined with the main LoTR story and offers strong plot-based game-play which is entirely independent and optional to the progress-based levelling content. As such the levelling content was still a harried hurtle of heedlessly running around trying to make progress quickly, a goal often obstructed by zones such as the North Downs and the Lone Lands (prior to its recent revamp) which required the player to run back and forth across the zones for little experience gain, thus causing a noticeable trough in the progress curve of a character and resulting in more than one player quitting the game in despondent frustration. Now LotRO has an alternative option, a player can turn to skirmishes to satiate their desire for progress, which is often left unfulfilled by the lengthy roaming nature of questing within the game. This also means, however, that players can now relax and enjoy the many meandering paths that they must follow while questing, and can thus take the time to revel in the incredible atmosphere of the beautiful world that Turbine has created.

I think that variety, in addition to quality, is a path that developers could definitely take further in MMOs in order to smooth out the frightening pace at which players consume the current design of MMO content. Offering alternative paths to quick but daily-capped experience gain within the context of the game, such as LotRO’s skirmishes, is a good way to keep players invested in the levelling system without feeling the need to blitzkrieg their way through the quest-based game-play that makes up the majority of the content.

On top of that, the remaining players will be forced to remain in the raid dungeon with KB for two years before getting a chance of any loot dropping.

Sounds like another example of nightmarish raid design, thank goodness real life isn’t anything at all like that.

In the now-Unlimited DDO I’ve been keeping an eye on “Today’s Deals” in the DDO store, and bought several discounted adventure packs of roughly the right level when they popped up. One of these was Tangleroot Gorge, which experienced DDOists will instantly recognise as the aforementioned hokey-cokey-esque in-and-out dungeon, but it hadn’t sounded any alarm bells when I bought it, so when Melmoth and I were looking for a bit of an adventure I casually said “oh, I’ve got this pack called Tangleroot Gorge I haven’t tried yet…” Turned out he’d run it a few times but was game for another, so we trotted along, got out of the Inn into the jungle, and…

… when I came back around I was lying in the hotel room, hands bleeding, the mirror was smashed, I could just remember something about napalm and “The End” by The Doors playing. Serious flashback, man. I almost hit the “unsubscribe” button as a reflex action, though not being subscribed in the first place made that a bit tricky. I needn’t have worried, though, the Return to Tangleroot Gorge was a textbook example of several areas of DDO’s improvements over the years.

It wasn’t *just* repeated runs through Tangleroot that made me give up back at launch, that was just the final frying pan that made the plastic donkey buck. A more significant problem was the need for a group to do anything, with the attendant overhead of forming or finding a group, then constructing an elaborate single transferable voting system with weighted alternatives to decide what to do. With variable difficulty levels in the dungeons now and hirelings to pad out your party it’s now far more flexible; being DPS types, Melmoth and I packed a couple of Cleric contracts for mobile Cure Serious Wounds dispensers and set out.

The first part of the adventure is a fairly large (for DDO) open jungle zone, big enough that a couple of wrong turns could land a laggard in a big enough pile of hobgoblins to cause trouble, and with sufficient canyons and ravines for people to poke their noses over the edge exclaiming “I wonder what’s down thaaaaaaAAAAARGH”. On the plus side, an excellent opportunity to exclaim “He’s fallen in the water!” in the river below, but a trifle annoying, especially if you land on a pointy rock at the bottom without the benefit of feather fall. So far as I can make out this bit hasn’t changed at all, but having a guide with uncanny navigational memory (to the point of being able to talk a guildmate through entirely by memory on voice chat: “you should be seeing a ruined temple coming up on the right, you’ll want to hang a left just before reaching it or the hobgoblins will get cross; if you get to the petrol station on the roundabout you’ve gone too far”) saved a good half hour or more of blundering that dragged things out the first time around, especially on top of the half hour of forming a group up.

At one point inside the dungeon itself, my Spot Sense tingled, indicating a nearby trap, and I got another flashback. The traps around launch seemed to be geared towards a pure rogue of the level of the adventure (if not higher) who hadn’t skimped on Int, put all available skill points into Spot, Search and Disable Traps, taken feats and enhancements to further boost those skills, was wearing Goggles Of Searching and Gloves Of Trap Disabling, had drunk a potion of trap detecting, and never rolled less than 15 on a 20 sided dice. The first run through the place back around launch was carnage, blades flying everywhere, flames shooting down corridors, an occasional cry in party chat of…
“Wait! I sense a…”
*CLICK* *fwooooooosh* STABSTABBURN
“… trap”

One of the advantages of revisiting the same dungeon seven times in a row was that the traps were in the same place each time. You would’ve thought that would make things easier for the rogue, as everyone halted, remembering previous spiky death, expectantly waiting for the trap to be disarmed. I’d boldly stride up to take my place in the spotlight, put on a deerstalker, pull out a magnifying glass and begin the elaborate pantomime triggered by activating the Search skill, to discover… nothing. Strange. Maybe there wasn’t a trap there on this iteration after…
*CLICK* *fwooooooosh* STABSTABBURN
… all. Or maybe I’d just missed it. Oops. Take three, and after the initial search didn’t turn anything up, I activated my limited use Skill Boost ability to perform a more thorough search, and eureka! I managed to find the control panel for the trap! Out with the thieves tools, I’d soon have this thing disarmed and made…
*CLICK* Critical disarm failure *fwoooooosh* STABSTABBURN
… safe. Oh dear.

I swear I only managed to disarm about one trap per twenty attempts, the others resulting in a fairly even mix of plain old failure and pointy-death critical failure. I’ve only got a couple of levels of Rogue this time around (though I’ve been dutifully keeping up Spot, Search, Open Lock and Disable Traps on the Ranger levels as well), and Turbine seem to have ratcheted things back to a rather more sensible level so there’s a very occasional critical failure, but by and large I’ve been able to detect and remove traps without divine intervention.

Anyway; over the course of a couple of nights, with various Waifs coming and going (quite easily, thanks to the flexibility of party composition and guest passes) we looped through Tangleroot Gorge two or three times, and rather than the hideous slog of years back it was a crazy romp. A couple of more experienced players have been bringing a dangerous hint of competency to the Friday night group; most of us can now hold the blunt wooden end of a weapon and stab the enemy with the pointy metal end with only gentle reminders, and we wound up clearing the entire chain on Elite.

Ctharsis: it’s like catharsis, but with more tentacles. (c) Melmoth

Expect the ‘press’ to carry on writing lengthy, circular arguments about it on slow news days for years to come, though.

That wouldn’t do at all, though. The exit of the outbuilding faced away from the warehouse, it would take too long to get out and cross the ground once the squad went in. I couldn’t just hide out of the way, I had to stick with the rest of the guys, so I formed up and waited for the squad leader to give the signal. At a wave of his hand the stalkers opened up: a mercenary fell straight away, the rest dived for cover and wildly returned fire. Our squad pressed forward, someone chucked a grenade to clear a couple of bandits from behind a pile of pipes, I saw my opportunity and sprinted forward to do what I was really here for: stripping the corpses of weapons and other useful stuff before the other stalkers could get to it.

I’ve really been enjoying Call of Pripyat. I played the first of the STALKER series, Shadow of Chernobyl, rough edges and not-compatible-with-save-game-patch and all, but never quite got around to the second, Clear Sky. A couple of weeks back Steam popped up a “loyalty offer” of a fiver off Call of Pripyat if you owned either of the previous games on Steam, and though I’d originally bought the box of the first game it was also part of the complete THQ pack, and that was all the incentive I needed to hit “Buy Now”.

Like the original, life is harsh when you’re first chucked into the Zone. If you’re not being savaged by the mutated wildlife you’re stumbling into radioactive or chemical hazards, or being chucked around by gravitational anomalies. The first time I started the game I looked around a bit, got up to make a cup of coffee or something without pausing it, and when I got back to the PC there were frantic radio messages telling me to seek shelter as there was a radioactive emission on the way, and even as I started sprinting for cover the screen flashed white and my first foray came to an ignominious end.

Though you’ve got an over-arching mission to track down five military helicopters that crashed in the Zone, you need to spend a while building up your resources to be able to find them all (and survive for more than a couple of seconds in their vicinity), and that early part of the game really shone for me, where you’re scavenging every old weapon and bit of ammo you can, to either use or (if in decent enough nick) sell. NPC AI isn’t exactly going to cause worries about Skynet taking over, but it’s realistic enough that stalkers and bandits wander about, pick up decent guns if they’re lying around, engage in firefights with each other or hostile wildlife and generally make the place seem lived-in. You get missions like the one I opened with, where you’re definitely fully committed to stamping out the bandits/mercenaries/rogue wildlife, but the bloke you’ve been sent out with has quite a nice weapon, and… well, obviously it would be unsporting if you shot him yourself, but if he happened to come a cropper, and you happened to snatch up the gun from his not-yet-cold dead fingers… it’s what he would have wanted.

Call of Pripyat has quite a strong Oblivion/Morrowind vibe; Fallout 3 is a natural comparison, only instead of a slightly kitsch 50s-America-in-the-future providing the background to the apocalypse it’s grim ex-Soviet concrete tower blocks. In both games I could happily spend a while looting an area, ferrying as much as my carrying capacity would allow into temporary caches, then back to the rough tin box that counted as home (though that probably says more about me than the games), slowly building up and upgrading an arsenal of weapons, ammunition and armour. Call of Pripyat doesn’t exactly sparkle in the text dialogue (I’m not sure if it’s a slightly weird sense of humour or gap in translation that makes you sign off half your conversations with “fugedaboudit”) or almost-trademark rough voice acting, but it’s efficient enough to send you off to do various bits and pieces around the Zone, and there are some nice set pieces here and there.

The last third of the game was a bit of a disappointment; once tooled up with an upgraded assault rifle and suit of armour you don’t really need to scavenge any more, and the missions in Pripyat were a bit linear, though there were a few neat shoot-outs and a spooky underground lab to explore. The very final mission was a real anticlimax, I was expecting a brutal fight for survival but it was a comparative walk in the irradiated park. Still, it didn’t take too much of the gloss off the rest of the game, and I’ll definitely have a search to see what mods are out there and give it another go sometime. Two slightly radioactive thumbs up!

I imagine it to be called the Shit to Quit ratio.

People in white lab coats set up various experiments where the subjects are tested over and over again against nonsensical, repetitive, frustrating or downright broken game mechanics until the breaking point is found and they quit the game in a torrent of rage and exasperation.

I think I’ve found my sweet spot on the scale with LotRO: there are several mechanics in that game that drive me almost to unsubscribe – a primary contender being random stuns that wrest control of my character away from me for any length of time – and yet I keep playing because those things are few and far enough between that they don’t quite drive me over the edge.

But only just.

Think of the benefits to society that we MMO players will provide if a Shit to Quit scale can be determined and a person’s place on it can be pinpointed accurately! Jobs could be matched to those people who will take crap from the boss without walking out the door; theme parks could be designed to make use of the absolute extremes of acceptable queue length without people leaving altogether; and movies could be made as short and repetitive as possible without audiences abandoning the cinema.

So remember, the next time you are feared uncontrollably into a pack of patrolling mobs during a dungeon run, or can’t run up the gentle incline of a slope, or have to fight your way through a bunch of pointless low XP, high HP mobs to get to a destination, you are doubtless secretly serving towards the advancement of humanity!