Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings.

Much like most things at this time of year, my gaming is coming in fits and starts of gluttonous excess followed by periods of pale-faced abstention where the slightest mention of the thing is at best likely to cause me to curl up into a ball, suck my thumb and whimper, and where running up the street screaming while wearing nothing but underpants and a wild-eyed unshaven expression of hair-tearing horror is a distinct possibility. I imagine it’s as much to do with the weird cocktail of choices, much like my festive eating habits where breakfast can consist of Christmas pudding and cold turkey one morning with a nice glass of port to wash things down, and then be followed the next day by the far more sensible choice of porridge and ice cream, my gaming has been, shall we say, eclectic.

In recognition of this, I thought I’d jot down some quick-fire thoughts over the next few days on various games that have been bumping around inside my head (the thoughts that is, not the games) and threatening to form an impromptu raid group and kill important memories such as my PIN, or whether zebras are white with black stripes or black with white stripes.

World of Warcraft has been fun enough, but I can’t see myself getting back into it in a major way. The world has changed, there are new things to see and do, but all of it so much like that which has gone before; for me WoW is becoming too much of a parody of WoW, the in-jokes have gone so far that WoW is now creating self-referential in-jokes about other in-jokes, and it feels as though that is what the whole world of Azeroth has become. It’s all a bit South Park or Simpsons, which is fine, but only if you weren’t hoping for something a little more serious. The curious thing is that the use of phasing and cut-scenes seems to imply that Blizzard are also trying to do the ‘adult storytelling’ thing at the same time, and for me it seems to run counter to the more general cartoon-like comedic nature of the rest of the game. What I would hope for is something akin to an interactive fable, with far-fetched magical events being balanced against a sagacious moral lesson, but what we get is something more like a Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown trying to explain War and Peace using suggestive sock puppets and one too many poo jokes.

There are also the standard MMO restrictions that make a mockery of Blizzard’s attempts at serious storytelling, and so the game leaves you confused and unsure whether you’re supposed to laugh or cry, like a clown delivering a eulogy at the state funeral of a king. Towards the end of the Worgen starter area there is a moment where your character and the leader of the Worgen confront the opposing faction – the last remnants of uninfected humans. On seeing your inevitable victory, their leader (and your main detractor/antagonist throughout the starter area) vows never to follow a Worgen leader, and runs off and throws himself from a nearby cliff. Poignant. I must admit I was caught in the seriousness of the moment, I looked to my Worgen leader and to the remaining human leaders, wondering what they would say. Nothing was forthcoming in the end, so I decided it was probably time to think about moving on.

At which point the chap who had just thrown himself from the cliff respawned in his original position in the midst of everyone.

Me: “D… didn’t you just throw yourself from that cliff yonder? D.. didn’t he just throw himself from that cliff? How have you returned, what sorcery is this?”

Human Leader: “What? Oh, that. No, it’s a water flume. We’ve built a giant water slide down the side there. Lord Godfrey likes to go for a quick slide when he gets bad news. Here, Godfrey, these poor Worgen thought you’d jumped to your death!”

Lord Vincent Godfrey: “Jump to my death? Oh good grief, no! Just a quick go on the water slide to calm my nerves. You don’t remember the water slides? Hmmm. You see, men? Their transformation has robbed them of their memories of Gilneas yet! They forget the ancient and noble history of water flume creation that our society was founded upon!”

Human Leader: “Oh the humanity!”

Lord Vincent Godfrey: “Come, let us leave them to the horror of their existence. I’m having another go on that most excellent water slide, and then I might go and relax in the jacuzzi for a while. Who’s with me?!”

Human Leaders: “Aye!”

[They all throw themselves off the nearby cliff in unison]

Meanwhile, EverQuest II released the most pointless playable race for an MMO yet: Vampires.

“What are you supposed to be then?”

“I am a Vampire! I am one of the undead! The ever-living! You cannot kill me!”

“Have you played an MMO before?”

“I… ah…”

“Have you ever known anyone to actually die, like, permanently?”

“Well, no but…”

“So you cannot die in a world where nobody dies? Is that, like, double death immunity? Y’know, just in case one of your ‘impossibilities of death’ doesn’t work? Genius.”

“I am still undead! That’s got to mean something, though, right?”

“Well, it means our cleric can turn you, or make you spontaneously combust, at will.”

What is ‘turning’ anyway? “I am a cleric, I can turn undead! Yes, left, right; name your direction, and I can make an undead go that way!” So undead are essentially the radio controlled cars of the Cleric world? Do Clerics set-up tracks and race undead around and around? Perhaps that’s why you get different speed zombies! Some have been upgraded with better motors to run on the A-spec undead race tracks, while the slower ones are more B-spec types.

Hmm, I think I’m on to something; a little more Christmas cake with Stilton should help me to maintain this train of thought into the next post.

Merry Christmas.

From all here at KiaSA – Melmoth, Zoso, and the train of angry mobstacles that followed them back to the blog one day – we’d like to wish a Merry Christmas to all, and to all some fat loot.

May your PuGs be merry and bright, and may all your instances delight.

Hibernation Time

With many thanks to the excellent PC Gamer

Thought for the day.

Dunegons & Dragons: Daggerdale looks most interesting. I wonder if this is the way for online adventure games to go: a new sub-genre of what are essentially traditional single player RPGs, but with online co-op play. It seems a much more sensible way to involve story in an online RPG, rather than trying to cram a fourth pillar into a ‘massively online’ model for RPGs that doesn’t need the extra support, as games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic are trying to do.

Having played in fixed static groups in several MMOs and found it to be one of the best ways to enjoy the game at a sensible pace, and at the same time having played co-operatively as part of a small group in various online console games, I really feel that the Small Party Online RPG genre is one that is worthy of consideration; persistent worlds, an engaging story that revolves around all of the players, and huge cinematic events – these things are not only possible but easier and considerably cheaper to produce in a game where the number of players is dramatically reduced and the balance of classes is more strictly controlled.

I believe there’s huge potential to tap in this market, and it will be interesting to see if games such as D&D:Daggerdale and LotR: War in the North will prove successful. It will only take one game with high production values and a staff that really understands the power they hold in the way their game differs from traditional MMOs, and we’ll see a whole new sub-genre, maybe even an entirely new genre, spring up; I don’t think that time is too far away, so get those pun-based blog names reserved, the next exciting movement in online RPGs may well be just around the corner.

It was the best of grinds, it was the worst of grinds

Even as m’colleague’s Cataclysm box languishes in the depths of a snowdrift somewhere, I’ve cancelled my WoW subscription. Got through the very first Worgen area, it was all very nice, but I just haven’t logged in since with everything else going on. Any of war (and indeed hammering) in Warhammer, fleet adventures in Pirates of the Burning Sea or heavy metal thunder in World of Tanks can quite happily take up an evening, but I’ve really been pulled back into Lord of the Rings Online.

I gave up on LotRO just after launch somewhere around level 27, when I recall content was getting a little thin and starting to involve a lot of travelling. This time around I’ve just hit level 27 on my new main character, I’ve hardly been outside Bree-land since getting through the introductory areas, and I’ve still got a full log of mostly outlevelled quests that I’m loathe to abandon. There are general quests, the storyline book content, dungeons, crafting, skirmishes and most recently Yule festival quests.

There’s been debate over holiday or festival quests ever since someone decided that just handing out sweets wasn’t a proper celebration of Easter and a repeatable “Collect five chocolate eggs” quest would be much more fun; nice additions to in-game lore or immersion breaking intrusions, fun little fluffy diversions or pointless grind interfering with normal play, implementation and player response varies considerably. LotRO seems to have some pretty well established regular events, and with this year’s Yule Festival there’s also a whole new zone, Winter-home.

There’s some interesting stuff in Winter-home. Snowball fights are always good. The theatre, where random players get called up on the stage to take part in a short play by performing suitable emotes, is rather fun, and the audience get to show their appreciation of a fine performance with a shower of petals, or lob rotten fruit if the acting isn’t up to scratch. The general tone of the zone is slightly unusual too (very minor spoilers follow, if the story is of great concern): it’s a festival town, where the Mayor ensures guests enjoy fun and games and feasting to excess, but they do so at the expense of exploited workers. Some quests involve helping the downtrodden (handing out festival coins, that could be bartered for in-game rewards, to beggars left on the streets after they helped build the town up), others keep them suppressed (moving those same beggars on so they’re not cluttering up the streets for the nice guests). Eventually you can work your way up to a final quest in the zone and either threaten to expose the Mayor’s corruption to secure better conditions for the workers, or help the Mayor put down a possible revolt, keeping him in power.

I actually felt bad moving beggars off the street, especially as your heartstrings are tugged a bit more by the game telling you they stumble off, frozen, without having collected anything, mumbling “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb anyone”. The final quest is a real dilemma, though; obviously The Right Thing would be to help out the workers, but the rewards for doing so are some tatty old clothes. Help out the Mayor, he’ll give you a really spiffy costume, including a top hat. Yes, a top hat. Many RPGs reward you for being virtuous, a classic example would be ridding a village of some terrible monster threat, and the poor farmers offer you the few copper pieces they can scrape together to thank you, you say “No, honest tillers of the soil, you need that copper more than I, slaying the beast is reward enough for me”, and the game gives you bonus XP or some other sort of character improvement. As far as I can make out, though, the Winter-home quest gives you nothing apart from the tatty clothes and a sense of enormous well-being for helping out the poor, you really do get the good stuff from being a git. Brutally suppressing a revolt doesn’t make the Mayor have second thoughts, he doesn’t cry “What have I become?” and invite everybody in to share a goose, he just kicks the ringleaders out and carries on. It wouldn’t be so surprising somewhere like Warhammer where pretty much everyone’s a bastard anyway, but it’s a little more jarring in a setting like LotRO and could give you pause as the Mayor points out your hypocrisy in helping the workers when you’ve been enjoying the feasting and such as much as everyone else.

For a few seconds.

For unfortunately the effect is slightly lost by the sheer MMOG-iness of it all. In a single player RPG the themes could really be developed, but MMOGs have to account for the Content Devourers. You imagine the developers slaving away creating the zone, adding the NPCs, carefully scripting the theatre events to take account of all conceivable player behaviour (fully aware there’ll be plenty of inconceivable player behaviour, but you do what you can), then they stick it up on the test server and Geoff starts a stop-watch to see how long it’ll take players to completely exhaust the content that took so many man-months to create.

“Thirty eight minutes and nine seconds” says Geoff, thirty eight minutes and nine seconds later, and that included typing up an exhaustive guide and taking screenshots. So they shove a couple of extra-blatant time-sink quests in (Winter-home’s best, or worst, example being Tidying Up, where you get to run around and click on 30 glowy bit of rubbish, waiting for a second or two each time) and make you repeat everything ten times if you want the final reward, with a once a day limit on most of the quests. Couple that with the fundamentally unchanging nature of MMO content, and instead of a microcosm of the class struggle with a festive theme you’re stuck in a bizarre pie-eating purgatory. You force the beggars to leave town, they shuffle off sadly, but are back within a minute. Instead of driving them off again you give them some coins and they’re thankful. Next day you give them more coins, then kick them out of town, while hundreds of other players do the same. The theatre puts on the same six-minute play ten times an hour, and if you’re desperate for all the deeds for chucking petals or fruit you sit through it again, and again, and again… Even the impact of the final quest, where you finally have to choose one side or the other, is somewhat undermined; to salve my conscience I helped the workers on my main character, but I couldn’t possibly miss out on a top hat (come on, top hat!), so I whipped an alt through the 30 quests, beat up some peasants, got the finery, and stuck it in the wardrobe so any other character on the account could use it.

Still, I’m hardly in much of a position to complain about repetitive grind. “Have you played an MMO before?” is the refrain of every static group on hitting similar issues, you know what you’re letting yourself in for with these things. It’s not like I was forced at gunpoint to run through all the quests. Repeatedly. Twice. It would be nice if there was a bit more cohesion between Story, World and Making Bars Go Up, but when it comes to the crunch you know there’s only one that really keeps people coming back. So maybe I’ll try another ten runs of the eating contest for a new title…

Quick guide to festive raids.

The key to the Reindeer encounter is fairly simple: isolating one particular reindeer will quickly allow your group to overcome the rest of the mobs and allow you to loot the sleigh. The reindeer and sleigh move around the zone at high speed and can’t be caught under normal circumstances. However, at certain times, fog will descend on the area for a short period; this is when you need to strike. Have your ranged DPS target the one reindeer with a very shiny nose, it should be obvious because it practically glows. When the fog arrives, the ranged DPS should snare and focus-fire that reindeer as a priority. Without the bright nose to guide them, the rest of the reindeer will be forced to land, allowing the tank to pick them up and the rest of the DPS to burn them down, until they are history. Once all reindeer are defeated, Santa will leap from the sleigh and engage the party in a weakened state, and can be quickly dispatched as a standard tank’n’spank fight. If you fail to stop the sleigh at this stage, however, Santa will eventually land on the roof of your guild hall and proceed as in previous years (see our guide for information on Santa’s abilities in this case).

For the Manger encounter there are several stages. Lord Jesus will initially lay down his sweet head and sleep, and cannot be engaged by the party at this time. The first stage involves the stars in the bright sky above the party, which will fire beams of light as they look down on Lord Jesus. The group should watch for the pool of light forming on the ground and step outside of it before the beam lands; anyone caught in a beam of light will take heavy damage over time, which will kill most characters in two to three seconds. The second stage is announced by the sound of lowing cattle, at which point Lord Jesus awakes. Lord Jesus doesn’t make any announcement of his awakening, so players need to watch for him beginning to move shortly after the cattle start lowing. Once the second stage begins Lord Jesus will take up a position in the sky above the party where he will look down upon them. Use the manger to line-of-sight block his stare (signified by a glowing white light around the player and a chorus of singing angels). Failure to block the stare in time will result in a shadowy copy of Lord Jesus staying by the side of the player until the end of the encounter. Stage three begins with all those players who have a Lord Jesus copy close-by receiving the Tender Care debuff, at which point those players are instantly killed as they are taken up to heaven to live with Lord Jesus. After this point Lord Jesus will descend and the remaining party members have a standard tank’n’spank fight, which will vary in difficulty depending on how many players were taken, and whether the party has a tank and healer remaining on the ground.

The Merry Christmas encounter is unusual in that it has no real fight to it. The players will face a group of mobs who will initially be friendly to the party. At this point players will randomly gain the Good Tidings buff which either increases run speed or reduces cooking skill inductions. At some point the mobs will turn aggressive and demand figgy pudding at random, with a timer bar appearing above their head which counts down; note that some timers count down faster than others. Players with the Good Tidings run buff should now collect the ingredients for figgy pudding from the tables on the far west side of the encounter area, and run them over to the ovens on the east side. Players with the Good Tidings cooking buff should then use the ingredients to cook a figgy pudding and hand it back to a player with the Good Tidings run buff. Finally, the figgy puddings should be delivered to those aggressive mobs demanding figgy pudding, taking care to feed those with the lowest timers first. If the timer runs out on a mob demanding figgy pudding, it will immediately dash towards the ovens or ingredients tables and then explode, instantly killing all players nearby. Once a mob has been fed it will despawn, but it will not leave until it gets some. The encounter ends once all mobs have left or all players are dead.

It seems that the Three Kings encounter is currently bugged as there is no way to tell which of the kings has the gold. As it is, follow the star (tip: the star always heads west at the moment, so just run west once you start the encounter) until your party catches the group of three kings, and then engage one. Once one king is engaged, the other two will despawn, after which it’s a fairly standard tank’n’spank fight. Upon defeating the king it’s just a matter of hoping that you loot gold, rather than frankincense or myrrh, which are vendor trash.

Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.

I’m in a bit of a funk with regards to gaming at the moment, nothing terribly disastrous but I’ve just had some bad luck with recent purchases.

I made the mistake of buying World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm expansion from Amazon, which still hasn’t turned up as of today. Of course I’m not alone, but as is usual in this modern world of ours, a large corporation can break its promises and obligations and happily just ignore the issue, sweep it under the carpet, and carry on paying out nice fat bonuses to its executives. Of course I’d gotten into that vicious cycle of giving them the benefit of the doubt and thus waited too long for the thing to arrive, rather than just going out and buying it elsewhere a day or so after it was delayed, and then returning the copy from Amazon should it ever turn up. Still, I’ve resolved today to go and buy a copy from a retail outlet, at which point, of course, my copy from Amazon will arrive. Along with seven other copies I didn’t order.

And then Lord of the Rings Online managed to frustrate me yesterday. Having needed some points and deciding to splash out and buy the maximum amount the day before, it was yesterday that they then decided to offer their points at a massive discount, so I lost out on 1900 points for the want of waiting one more random day before spending money with them. It’s not the end of the world, but it seems backward that people who have purchased points are ‘punished’ for investing in the game as and when they needed the points, whereas people who hung around not paying anything get a potential bonus for not investing earlier. Of course it’s all just business, Turbine/Codemasters are just trying to give another incentive for people to spend money in the store, and they certainly don’t care about people who have already spent money with them, but the timing of it – one day meaning the difference of some £15 or so – was a bit galling for me. For my part it has probably lost them money in the long run, as had the offer been advertised I would have waited and bought two lots of points; now, as it stands, I’ll probably not buy any more points again. Why do so? Why risk giving them money only for them to put the points on offer the very next day.

My actual gaming is progressing rather splendidly, however. I have lots of games on the go, and although my writing here has slowed down this month, that’s mainly due to being excessively busy at work; not having much to say about these games that hasn’t already been said before; snow; and having a two-year-old who is just starting to understand and enjoy the wonders and delights of Christmas – it’s pretty much impossible not to want to be a part of that.

I’ve headed back into Warhammer Online and I think the recent changes Mythic have implemented to open RvR are much for the better, although it’s interesting to see how sections of the existing player-base are having trouble adapting away from the ‘Zerg Only Keep Doors For Great Victory’ mentality that was prevalent, nay, necessary, in the old system. Lord of the Rings Online is still very enjoyable despite my basement-nerd-fist-shaking outrage at having narrowly lost out on a great deal, and with a static group character to play, as well as my Warden working her way through the Volume 1 epic storyline, there’s plenty to keep me occupied. Other games on my play-list are Pirates of the Burning Sea, which recently went free-to-play, and looks to be a cracking little diversion if I can ever get my mind ‘holding the weather gage’ to the game’s many and various mechanics; and World of Warcraft, which I’ve been holding off on until my expansion box arrives (ha!) because I intend to play a new character and don’t want to burn out playing through the high level content before I’ve had a chance to roll my Worgen warrior.

So, plenty of games to keep me ticking over until the next Great Hyped Hope arrives; Rift is sounding more interesting by the day, and I can’t listen on Spotify to the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra’s rendition of the Guild Wars theme without experiencing a rather emotional desire to be wandering the lands and experiencing the world that Guild Wars 2 professes to offer. I’m increasingly unsure about Star Wars: The Old Republic however; I have a deep seated desire to play it, make no mistake, but it’s how I will play it that leaves me uncertain. At the moment, from the limited information available, it seems as though the game will be a solo affair – Mass Effect: Star Wars Edition, say – with the vague potential for online cooperative play should you so desire.

Each of these three games tries to make their world, and the stories within that world, dynamic in a way that engages the player far more than we have experienced in MMOs up until now. It seems that this concept will serve as the foundation for the next generation of MMOs, but whether it will succeed is still anyone’s guess. My prediction is that there will be a tangible ‘something’ that attracts new players to these next generation MMOs, but that it will be Blizzard who – as World of Warcraft did with EverQuest – take the essence of that concept, fold it into Titan and make it accessible and mainstream, thus creating the next MMO behemoth.