Godgifu of the grind.

“But this time I was ready for the grind. I headed over to pick up Mr Flapnoodle, this time leaving my clothes with the confused but otherwise relieved dwarf, and then headed into northern Angmar to hunt the hundreds upon hundreds of Angmarim I’d need to complete my reputation grind, nobly riding naked to battle but for my cape flapping restlessly in the wind behind me.”

You may have noticed the rather exceptional Victorian undergarments apparent on my character; yes, even when your character isn’t wearing any armour in Lord of the Rings Online they’re still more modestly covered than the heaviest-armour-wearing female warriors of other MMOs.

Alas there’s no evidence of Mr Flapnoodle in the screenshot, but I think he was busy steering the horse at the time.

Always remember, though, the best way to grind in an MMO is naked but for a cape and a small sock puppet.

Now to go and have a word with the elves of Mirkwood, I think there are some orcs there that I could go and eat food loudly while smacking my lips near, Mr Flapnoodle says they hate that.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition.

I recently undertook a reputation grind with my Warden in Lord of the Rings Online, another of those grouting duties that I usually avoid on my various characters, only ever achieving maximum status with the various factions in MMOs through the incidental advancement that occurs during the course of levelling a character. Being at the level cap and not being of a raiderly mindset, however, I find myself wanting to overpaint the canvas of my character in other ways. Of the three ‘c’s that advance a character in an MMO –Completion, Customisation and Cultivation– only Cultivation is restricted at the level cap to just two areas of advancement, funnelled as it is into the primary palettes of raiding and PvP. Of course, Completion and Customisation can both be advanced through raiding and PvP, but there are also other shades of game-play in which the two can be mixed.

In terms of LotRO then, Cultivation is advancing the power level of your character through the usual MMO channel of ever-increasing item levels; Completion is all about fully fleshing out the character, achieving all that there is to achieve in the game: collecting all the deeds, reaching maximum reputation rank with all the various factions, exploring all the nooks and crannies the game has to offer; and Customisation is all about making the character you want, be it through cosmetic items, mounts, titles, housing, or character builds. Many areas of Cultivation will also offer ways to advance Completion or Customisation, but it’s very rare that, say, Completion will offer a way to advance Cultivation once you reach the end game. For example, completing the not insignificant achievement of ‘What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been’ in World of Warcraft grants the player a mount, something which may be cosmetically appealing (Customisation), a form of status recognition for your hard work (Completion), but which offers nothing in the way of advancing your character’s innate power level (Cultivation).

It’s fairly apparent as to why this situation exists in these MMOs: the fact that character power level is based primarily on item improvement, items which are made redundant with each expansion of the end-game, means that rewarding a chest piece for ‘What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been’ would be pointless as soon as the next expansion is released. Or would it? Blizzard have already introduced the concept of heirloom items, items which increase in power as your character does, could significant achievements such as ‘What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been’ reward items that increase in power with the character and maintain a power level equivalent to end-game raiding rewards?

Back to the reputation grind, though. The chain of events which led me to grind away for reputation was itself interesting. I’d decided to complete the Virtue traits on my character, getting them all to the current maximum of level ten. To do this I had to perform various deeds, which for the melee-based traits generally involves using sharp pointy bits of metal to convince mobs to shuffle off their mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. The trait I was working on at the time required me to kill three hundred orcs in Angmar, something which was time consuming but not a challenge since I had long out-levelled the area, so it was a suitable time to listen to a podcast or two while roaming around a camp of orcs and slaughtering them with wild unhindered abandon, the sort of one-sided fight equivalent to dropping a great white shark into a heavily populated hospital swimming therapy pool. Grinding a deed in this way is a bit like weight training for will power: you have a little counter in the top corner of your screen which counts up as you start to kill orcs, but three hundred seems like an impossible task, especially after you spend what seems like an eternity slaughtering away like the Tazmanian Devil in a bathtub of bunnies, only to look up and find that you’ve killed just ten orcs. So you start trying to trick your mind, ‘Right, we only have to do that twenty nine more times and we’re done. Twenty nine isn’t a very big number is it now? So, let’s do another ten. Can you give me another ten reps? Okay, here we go then: one, two, three… feel the burn… four, five, six… keep that sword arm nice and straight… seven, eight, nine annnnnnnd ten. Good! And relax. Shake it out, have a breather, and then we’ll do another ten’.

Such tricks only last so long however, and then you start to go mad: you start to move around as you fight such that the dead orcs make pretty patterns on the ground with their corpses, or spell out rude words that can be seen from the air by low-flying Nazgûl; you try to find interesting weapons in your inventory to kill the orcs with, bludgeoning a captain to death with a haddock, and then stabbing his second in command with a hat pin; then you progress to trying to find various unique ways to initiate combat: standing near the orc camp and talking loudly on a mobile phone, for example, or running around and altering all the heights of their office chairs, or standing uncomfortably close behind on orc and reading its copy of the Nazgûl News over its shoulder. By the end of the session you’re running around naked save for your cape, half an orc skull balanced on your head, and orc eyes pushed on to the end of your toes. Your right hand still holds your sword, but your left hand is now Mr Flapnoodle –formed from a pouch made of a warg ear with orc nipples for eyes– who tells you what to kill next by whispering in your ear; the orcs have learnt to fear the judgement of Mr Flapnoodle, and you obey because he’s hidden your teeth somewhere inside your face and you need them to become Queen of the Monkey Bees.

I don’t normally do reputation grinds, and now you know why.

Having finished killing the three hundred orcs, who weren’t nearly as big a challenge as the three hundred Spartans I’d killed the day before, I sold all the junk I’d collected and found myself with a bag still half full with reputation items. Seeing as they were effectively free from my earlier exertions while attempting to complete the Orc Genocide deed, it seemed silly to thrown them away, so I put my clothes back on, left Mr Flapnoodle in the care of a confused looking dwarf who seemed to be trying not to throw up, and made my way over to Esteldín to hand in the reputation items with the rangers there. The Rangers of Esteldín, an elite band of warriors who remain hidden from the enemy by carefully guarding the location of their secret base, never telling a soul, never letting on, never revealing in any way where they come from. Not even a hint. ‘Hello, we’re the Rangers of Esteldín! Where are we from? We can’t tell you that. Are we from Esteldín? Who told you that?! Gentleman, we have a spy in our midst! We, the Rangers of Esteldín, will not stop until… hang on…’ Anyway, having handed in all the reputation items I’d gathered to the newly named Rangers of SHHHHH IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE A SECRET DAMMIT I found that I had reached the maximum level of reputation with them, and as such I had a look at the rewards on offer. Of course there was nothing in the way of Cultivation, but they did offer a new mount, which obviously appealed to the Customiser in me. It was going to cost me five gold, an amount which my character can comfortably afford but which is nevertheless not an insignificant expense, so I did a little research in order to make sure it didn’t suffer from the Horse Eye of DOOM or any other such mind twisting deformity. Alas, although the horse is without strange features it is also a little plain, and I couldn’t bring myself to justify the expense for another mount that I would probably never use because I already had several handsome specimens. I did, however, notice the Prized Angmar’s Free People’s Steed while I did my research, which is possibly the best looking mount I’ve seen in the game. And that was it, my flame of desire was suddenly fully fanned, I had a goal, covetousness was upon me, game-play had emerged from a chain of unrelated events, and all that was required of me was to grind out Kindred reputation with the Council of the North.

But this time I was ready for the grind. I headed over to pick up Mr Flapnoodle, this time leaving my clothes with the confused but otherwise relieved dwarf, and then headed into northern Angmar to hunt the hundreds upon hundreds of Angmarim I’d need to complete my reputation grind, nobly riding naked to battle but for my cape flapping restlessly in the wind behind me.

Running out of Steam

Steam’s Summer Camp event has been going for almost a week, and despite being a sucker for a bargain (or possibly just a sucker), especially when it comes to Steam, I haven’t bought anything yet. Being fully hooked on LotRO and World of Tanks at the moment I don’t have the vulnerability to a shiny new game that MMOG burnout often causes, which could well be a major factor in that, but nothing has really jumped out as being an exceptional bargain so far.

Course previous Steam sales have slightly recalibrated what an “exceptional bargain” is to the point that I barely look at anything over £10 unless it’s the entire back catalogue of a publisher, and even a fiver seems a bit steep for a single game. The Witcher 2 sounds a fine game, but even with 33% off was a bit much; I’m interested in Fable 3, but lukewarm reviews made me think twice about it, even at £15. I’m really keen to pick up Total War: Shogun 2 at some point, but the Total War series need a decent amount of time to play, and I still haven’t finished my Peninsular campaign in Napoleon: Total War. Previous Steam sales have also packed my library with games I might’ve been tempted by like Tropico 3 and Just Cause 2, which reminds me I must get back to them at some point as well…

An interesting facet of the event is the ability to win tickets through various achievements, the tickets then entering you into a prize draw for games from your wishlist, but also acting as a currency that you can exchange for a variety of DLC-type prizes (Edit: PC Gamer conveniently just posted a list). The majority of achievements are within specific games, none of which I’ve had so far, but one a day is usually something connected to Steam itself (joining a group, leaving a comment, uploading a screenshot etc.) which I’ve been ticking off, so I’m now trying to decide if I want to cash the tickets in for snorkels on the robots in Portal 2 or an entire Alien Breed game…

It may all be an insidious plot to infiltrate Steam into everything you do, collate massive amounts of customer data and/or maintain a stranglehold on PC gaming, but in general I like the platform and what they’re doing with it even if they’re not offering a super-pack of every game of the last 10 years for 76p. Microsoft, meanwhile, are shuffling Games for Windows Live to XBox.com because… erm… they want to save the ten bucks on domain renewal?

UK Governement heads calls for Cthulhu-based games

Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, gave a speech last week to the Royal Society emphasising importance of mathematics, and unusually for a politician mentioned games in a positive context:

“Computer games developed by Marcus Du Sautoy are enabling children to engage with complex mathematical problems that would hitherto have been thought too advanced. When children need to solve equations in order to get more ammo to shoot the aliens, it is amazing how quickly they can learn. I am sure that this field of educational games has huge potential for maths and science teaching and I know that Marcus himself has been thinking about how he might be able to create games to introduce advanced concepts, such as non-Euclidean geometry, to children at a much earlier stage than normal in schools.”

Marcus du Sautoy is really engaging and pops up quite frequently in the media (like whenever In Our Time covers a mathematical subject), and the project Gove was referring to is Manga High. Not too sure about the name, but the resource, maths games for schools, is quite impressive. Never mind the kids, I had a crack at the trial version of a few of the games and was most disappointed when the trial of BIDMAS Blaster expired just as I’d upgraded the rubbish starter pistol to a laser rifle and was really mowing down robot hordes. The full thing is free for schools and offers individual logins coupled with statistics, targets, medals, achievements etc., seems like a fairly positive use of “gamification”.

Of course looking at du Sautoy’s aspirations, if there’s one setting that screams “non-Euclidean geometry” (albeit not quite as loudly as it screams “Aieeeee, the horror, the horror”) it’s the Cthulhu Mythos, which leads to the inescapable conclusion that Mr Gove is calling for games of brain-bending horror to be made compulsory in schools. Hurray!

Mr Bigger, whatever are you doing down there?

I hopped in to Age of Conan: Unchained over the weekend, the now free-to-play version of Funcom’s fantasy frolic through Robert E. Howard’s world of brawn, beasts and breasts. With the release of this edition of their game, Funcom have decided to make it unrated, which thus allowed them to fully expand on the latter of that troika of fantasy staples. And when I say ‘fully expand’ I am being literal:

Apart from the fact that either some enterprising soul in Aquilonia has invented both silicon and a way to implant it into female breasts, or a Stygian teenager found an interesting new use for the Dark Arts while furiously practising with his magic wand in his bedroom, there’s also the splendidly ridiculous innuendo-laden increase to a male character’s ‘size’, where one assumes that it actually changes height, and not length or girth as the text might lead one to believe.

Age of Conan? Carry On Conan more like. Hopefully they’ll add a Kenneth Williams-esque ‘Ooooo, matron’ emote, which would, admittedly, be a strong contender to take the crown from our long term favourite.

Funcom are also taking the prestige cosmetic MMO mount to new levels:

Yes, yours for only 1100 Funcom points, or about $10, is a virtual prostitute! A cosmetic pet in every sense of the phrase. There’s also a priestess for 2100 points, but I’d watch out for those high class ones because they expect you to take them to the opera and buy them dinner in an expensive restaurant as a bare minimum before they give you their bear minimum, and where are you going to find a staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Age of Conan anyway?

Still, Sparkle Pony hasn’t got anything on Slapper Priestess.

Of course Anarchy Online has had a perfectly normal Funcom-Points-powered store for a good long while now, so Age of Conan’s slightly (im)mature cash shop is not necessarily a sign of things to come. Regardless though, I couldn’t help but wonder how they intend to monetize their forthcoming supernatural MMO The Secret World, and whether it too would offer options via an in-game store:

The Secret World. Let me tell you the great secret of the world, honey. The secret is… [waves you in closer] the secret is… in my underpants. I’ve got your secrets right here, baby. Yes, find out all the secrets of my underpants, unlock my deep dark treasure, for just 2500 Funcom Points!

Of course it would obviously help if that was delivered by a buxom young lady in tight leather, rather than the craggy bearded geriatric old man in a crusty pee-stained bathrobe that I was picturing.

SOE reveal plans for closure of Star Wars: Galaxies, announce new game

GUNBARREL, CO – Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game Star Wars Galaxies is to close in December this year. In an interview with Massively, Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedly said that the contract with LucasArts would be running out in 2012, and SOE and LucasArts had reached a mutual business decision to shut down the game.

In a more upbeat press conference afterwards, SOE were delighted to announce the launch of a brand new game. “We’ve brought all our experience to this new game to give players a rich, deep experience in a world with a brand new IP, War Stars” said spokesman Smohn Jedly.

Jedly detailed some elements of the new universe, in which An Alliance That Is Rebellious led by the heroic Skuke Lywalker and roguish San Holo battle an oppressive Empire That Rules On A Galactic Scale spearheaded by the fearsome Varth Dader and his Storperial Imptroopers. The team even have plans for the first expansion, Lump to Jightspeed, in which players can blast into space to take part in dogfights with W-Xings and FIE Tighters.

“We’ve got a really great team behind the game” said Jedly “and we’re especially glad to have Kaph Roster on board.” Dismissing suggestions that the new game sounded a bit familiar, he told the press “You can play a hairdresser in this game. Does that sound like something based on a popular science fiction franchise?”

Jedly closed the conference with a cryptic hint that SOE’s next MMO could centre around a faerie detective living in Oxford: “Morse the Fey be with you”

Silence is the most powerful scream.

I’ve been playing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings on those rare occasions when the delight has temporarily faded from hunting wolves, shaving angry badgers, or run-by punching crows from their perches in a shocked puff of feathers in order to appease some random MMO NPC who will never speak to me again once I’ve completed the task for them. I mean, I’m not asking for much, but once I’ve performed whatever task the NPC demanded of me –run halfway around the world on an errand, or saved their children from orc raiders, or unblocked their toilet– half the time they’ll just outright not speak to me at all, and the other half of the time… well, I get the vague impression that they might be trying to avoid me

“Hello again Norman NPC!”

“I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“It’s me, the guy who rescued you last week from being crushed by the butcher’s wife when she fell on you from the top of that haystack. Remember? I heard the screaming, and came running, like the hero I am. Surely you remember: the impact was so great that it had blasted fully half the clothes from the pair of you, and she was still in the residual stages of bouncing up and down when I rounded the corner and tackled her to the ground before she crushed you further!”

“Oh, right. Yeah, look, this is a bad time, I’m kind of busy. Sorry.”

“Are you sure? You seem to be just standing around aimlessly. I can tell because I’m standing right next to you… [waves amiably] Hel-lo.”

“Dam… hi, sorry, thought we were on the telephone; forgot we hadn’t invented it yet.”

“The telephone?! My word, we haven’t even discovered gunpowder yet, and here you are dashing off and pre-inventing the telephone already! I mean, we’ll have to imagine inventing electricity first!”

“Yeah, anyway, I really am very busy. I really appreciate what you did for me, and taking it upon yourself to further help out and artificially inseminate my herd of yaks, which was no mean task.”

“You’re most welco…”

“Since they’re all males.”

“Ah.”

“But I’m afraid I don’t have time to talk right now.”

“Oh. Well, okay. Fair enough.”

“Okay.”

“Okay then.”

“Uh huh.”

[I look hopefully at the NPC]

“[sigh] Yes?”

“You really don’t seem terribly busy…”

“I’m, uh, meditating.”

“Meditating?”

“Yes, I’m trying to find inner peace, harmony, and an unconditional selfless love for my fellow man.”

“Oh.”

“Now piss off.”

Maybe I shouldn’t expect so much. After all, they did give me a knackered old pair of boots two sizes too small for my character to wear as reward for saving their entire village from being captured by orcs and sent to work as green coats at the orc equivalent of Butlins. But these NPCs, they’re all “Save us! Save us!” and they’re your best friend and won’t stop talking to you “Do this. Go there. Take that. Rub my feet”, until you’ve performed their tasks for them, and suddenly you find that they’ve unfriended you on Facebook, and stopped following you on Twitter. I mean, really.

I’ve stalled slightly on The Witcher 2 however, not getting all that terribly far through the game, and thus there shouldn’t be any spoilers in this post, because if there are then it’ll probably spoil it for me too, at which point I promise I’ll turn to myself and punch me off my chair.

I’ve reached Chapter 2, where the most memorable part of Chapter 1 was the huge forest in which you spend most of your adventuring ‘me time’, wandering around just stabbing stuff for stabbing stuffs sake. Witcher 2 is a beautiful game, graphically and atmospherically, and the needle on the immersion-o-meter was definitely lolling (but definitely not loling) towards the redline on the display whenever I took the time to wander through CD Projekt’s carefully crafted abyssal chthonic resonator. Chapter 2, however, is where I came a little unstuck. As a veteran of many an RPG campaign, the ‘install yourself in a city, follow a main quest line, and collect every meaningless side quest you can find along the way in the hope of finding a weapon upgrade or two’ style of play has begun to wear a little thin. Especially when you consider the nature of our protagonist, from the Wikipedia entry:

“[…] witchers are monster-hunters who receive special training and have their bodies modified at an early age to provide them with supernatural abilities so they can battle extremely dangerous monsters and survive.”

Which means it’s always hard to be searching on hands and knees through an ancient ruin for Dwane the dwarf’s mithril ring, a long lost family heirloom which he lost while adventuring, when you could otherwise be hunting fearsome monsters. More so when you eventually return to town holding the ring far out in front of you, pinching it lightly between two fingers, a pose which you assumed the moment you realised that this ring was never designed to go on a finger. Dwane defensively proclaims to your back that eroticism is a valid form of adventuring as you walk away with your newly acquired pair of old boots two sizes too small for you.

It’s the usual RPG feeling, that wonderment as to how NPCs ever manage to get on in their lives when the Witcher, or generic hero type X, is not around to help them with their every single measly chore

“Witcher! Trolls are attacking the orphanage!”
“Witcher! There are giant rats in my cellar!”
“Witcher! I can’t get the lid off this jar!”
“Witcher! This garden gate squeaks when it opens!”
“Witcher! There’s an itch on my back I can’t reach!”
“Witcher! The lawn needs mowing!”
“Witcher! My prostate needs checking!”
“Witcher! I need to consolidate my debts into one easy manageable loan!”
“Witcher! I have something in my eye!”
“Witcher! We’re going to my mother’s, put the child seat in the cart!”

I mean, the immersion-o-meter is still reading quite high in Chapter 2, but only because I switched it over to measure the SI unit of Henpecking.

I’m slowly making my way through the game anyway, because I feel I owe it that much from the unadulterated joy it gave me in Chapter 1, but the further I progress the more eerie the town I’m residing in becomes; the more I rub backs, peel potatoes, wax bikini lines, and trim hedgerows, the more residents there are who seem to have suddenly and wholly taken to the philosophy of silent self contemplation.