Shotgun thoughts

Things I think about while Im not updating my blog:

"Friends" who act sincere to you around other people, and then ignore you completely when they would have to interact with you alone piss me off. And I seem to be running into those kind of people a lot lately. Honestly, Im not so important to ANYONE that you have to fake being nice to me to impress someone else. Grow a set and tell me to eff off to my face, rather than hoping Ill just go away. I will just go away, but its just plain cowardly.

WAR is pretty damn cool, though I wonder whats going on with this 1.05 patch. Still, the game lives up to its billing, and while its no WoW killer, its going to make a nice solid run of it on its own merits.

Fallout 3 is a great game, inheriting the spirit of Fallout 1 (and the fan patched version of Fallout 2) while including the things Obsidian does best. Which amusingly work so much better in Fallout than in the various Morrowind games that introduced them...

Im not sure how Im going to make it through the holidays. I may just have bitten off more than I can chew.

Life can be pretty good, like mine is right now, and yet you can still have the urge to unload petty problems. Sadly, I only seem to piss people off with that, even though I have always extended a sympathetic ear. Sometimes what goes around doesnt come around. Ally McBeal had it right. Your own problems are always big and important, and others peoples problems are small and uninteresting. Read more!

WAR Beta report 1

So, yesterday they lifted portions of the NDA for the WAR Beta. Which means I can once again chatter about one of the things I like best right now, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning.

Ive been in the Beta for a few months now, and the first thing I wanted to get out about this Beta was how well it was run. In many betas Ive been in, you dont get the impression that your there as anything more than to get a preview of the game, even in "closed" betas. The Devs are unresponsive, suggested changes ignored, and key parts of the game are "reserved for live" and thus never tested before release by a wider audience.

Not so in this Beta. With a pool of three quarters of a million people to pick from, and a community management tradition started by the legendary Sanya Weathers, the WAR beta is intense, well organized, and boasts incredible interaction with the dev team. Granted, some of that comes about because those who deviate from the rules set forth are replaced from that staggering pool of people looking to beta test the game, but the rules themselves are not onerous, and the sense of satisfaction that comes from knowing (and seeing!) one of your suggestions get incorporated into the game makes up for any amount of rules.

And what a game! While the basic systems are tried and true, with only iterative polish rather than truly innovative changes, there are features in this game that I predict will become the new standard for MMOs to come.

The basics of the class system present "paired" classes between Destruction and Order, classes that share a mechanic and play style between them. Their are exceptions (largely because a number of classes where cut for the initial release), in general if there is a style of play you like in WAR, it is available to you on both sides of the RvR coin. The exceptions are the Chaos Chosen (Aura tanks), Dwarf Ironbreakers (Grudge building tanks), the High Elf Shadow Warrior (Skirmish RDPS), and Chaos Marauders (two weapon MDPS).

Classes get abilities to be used at various times and with various recharge times, as with most MMOs these days. Similar to DaoC, there is a Mastery system that lets a player focus his particular Tank or Mage to one aspect of the class or another, but the really interesting part of character development comes from Tactics. Tactics are various "switches" that can act as buffs to critical stats, can change the behavior of particular powers dramatically, or reward a particular play style with even further focus. For example, a tactic might take a power that only comes back once every 20 seconds (an eternity in player vs player combat, usable maybe once a combat) and reduce its recharge to 10 seconds. And it might do that to two related powers, meaning a player could change the entire sequence of actions for their character with just one tactic.

Fortunately, as you play through the level advancement, the options for your character are presented in manageable chunks, allowing you to develop your particular play style in the safety of the PvE environment and then test it in the fires of RvR long before you finish your development and enter the end game.

Much can and will be said of RvR in Warhammer. I find that Mythic's long experience with DaoC has distilled into one of the best PvP setups Ive ever had the pleasure to play in 10 years of MMO's. From subtle but far reaching design decisions like player collision and a longer time to kill, to obvious and welcome choices such as a distinct absence of that bane of PvP: Stuns/Mezzes, RvR is fast paced and exciting without being over so quick that you cannot react to changing circumstances (such as a new group of enemies joining the fray!). Realm vs Realm also puts a firm structure to what is generally a messy and often decidedly ugly and bullying form of online interaction. Because it is Realm vs Realm, you have a ready pool of allies wherever you go, without having to join a guild or know 30 other people who play the game when you do. Since this means the game is NOT a war of all vs all, but instead provides natural battle lines that players can relate to (pandering to the other great motivator (it seems) in online players, cliquishness. But it beats pandering to dominance games and bullying...), a casual player without a large guild can take part in RvR and not feel overwhelmed or excluded. Better yet, you can now join with all these allies and are presented with clear goals to try to accomplish, from beating the other side in instanced skirmishes or taking and holding a keep in the non-instanced world, all with visible and immediate effects on the world at large to give you a sense of accomplishment.

RvR is definitely the highlight of this game, but PvE has not been neglected. Im here to tell you that the Public Quest system is the one system I expect everyone to be copying as soon as they can figure out how to do it without getting sued. This one system, now being coupled with a "Public Group" system that makes finding a group truly simple, forms more bonds, and provides more direction to this MMO than any I have ever seen. And they do not hide the Public Quests away in unreachable areas reserved to guilds, oh no. You will run into a Public Quest within 10 minutes of starting out, and they are readily available through out your advancement in the PvE (and sometimes RvR!) game. And participating meaningfully is simplicity itself. As you enter the area of a Public Quest, clear instructions on what is needed to advance the quest are put up in your on screen quest tracker, and you can immediately begin to accomplish those goals, even if you havent helped with any earlier stages. Participate vigorously, and even a solo player stands a good chance of winning the roll for exceptional loot that occurs at the end of the linked set of events that forms a PQ's cycle. Even if you dont win on the PQ loot roll however (which happens automatically and has so far proven difficult for players to grief), you still gain "Area Influence" that unlocks guaranteed rewards just for participating.

The addictive pull Public Quests exert is hard to describe, but once the concept settles into players minds, Im sure we'll see them in other MMOs. The WAR devs deserve kudos for this system alone, but fortunately, its not the only place where WAR shines. More on that in my next post.
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Silence, it is ending.

Its been a busy few months. Two months, anyway. Moving house takes a lot out of you, but probably the biggest reason for my silence lately is that one of the things I like to talk about the most I cant talk about publicly anymore. Make of that, what you will :)

Still, there have been a few developments. Fallout 3 is looking slick (its Bethesda, of course it will look slick...). Age of Conan is thrashing about, and I really feel for them. That is a good game that suffers for having reached to far to fast. Hopefully, the mature themes and nudity will keep enough players that they can patch themselves into greatness. Granted, they are probably not the kind of players I would want to play with, but such is the problem with the internet.

My new house is on 6 acres of forest and some yard in the middle of nowhere. So, of course, one of the first things I bought was a chainsaw. Apparently, besides the obvious uses for a chainsaw, you can use them to cut down trees, cut downed trees into chunks to be then split into firewood, and in general, do things with trees. Who knew? I mean, trees just SIT there. They dont shamble menacingly towards you, not even very very slowly. Unlike the thing you really use a chainsaw on...

So, anyway, chainsaw. And an axe (ahhh, that takes me back). And a splitting wedge, which is a damn sight easier to split a log with than an axe, thanks Dad for not having one when I was a kid... :)

I also picked up a Hava, for use with my dual-DSL connection. Just as soon as I can get Iowa Telecom to get me a config that allows outside connections to come in. The dual-DSL is pretty sweet (I use an RV042 to load balance the two links, and hook a WRT350N wireless to it (in non-router mode) to actually connect all my machines up), though its a pain to get configured. And Iowa Telecom appears to do "traffic shaping" on even legitimate torrents (such as what many game companies use to distribute patches...), so thats annoying as hell. If anyone knows of a good HTTPS proxy service that isnt some skeezy spam front, drop me a line.

The Hava is actually pretty nice. Being able to use any of my computers as a TV (at 480p 16:9 HD no less!) is very nice. I often watch TV and play a video game at the same time, and this lets me move the giant honking, filled with flashy blue lights, desktop out of the home theater area. Which I appreciate. Now that I have somewhere where I can consider putting in a home theater!

Next adventure: Furniture. Who knew it was so expensive. Dont get me started on flooring...
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Age of Conan - open beta thoughts

Ive played as much of the open beta of Age of Conan as they will let me, but as far as that goes, I believe this should be a success for the AoC crew. Despite a 13 (out of 80) level cap, and several features (and "features", more on that later) being disabled, the game comes off very good in this open beta.

After the jump, the good, and yes, even some of the bad of 13 levels of Age of Conan.

First, the good, because theres a lot of it and I want to gush a little.

Just to get it out of the way, yes, the game is gorgeous. Great graphics, and congratulations on taking my 7950GX2 and 2 GB of system ram machine and driving it to its knees. Time for an upgrade. You need a monstrous system for this game, but thats not a bad thing at all, and the graphics are wonderful to look at. Sound effects and music are actually great too, this is one of the only MMO's Ive ever played with the sound on. Most MMO's, the repetitive and constant sound effects, coupled with a distinct lack of any kind of immersive environmental sound, have me reaching for my speakers power button. AoC, on the other hand, has the local cats trying to find out where the damn tropical bird is in my room.

Sound also gets wisely used for voice on every quest giver Ive run into in a too short foray into the game as a whole. This is very very welcome, even if it must consist of a substantial part of the 12GB on my drive this game takes up. An MMO with excellent voice acting, where NPC's are throwing out curses straight out of a Conan book and you get to throw back things like "flea-bitten dog" and "Has the jungle raped your mind of all reason"? Yes please, Ill take more of this.

Writing and the effort the developers have gone to to immerse the player in the Conan universe is flat out my favorite part of this game. The classic, somewhat overwrought dialogue of a Sword and Sandle fantasy would have justified the M for Mature rating, and payed it off all by itself. And Im glad that the writers have cut loose given that they dont have to write to a pre-teen audience. The quests, while very often just the same old Fed-Ex stuff you get anywhere else, are made far more entertaining in how they are presented to you, and how you may choose to react to them. Being given the option, when presented with a truly trite request, to say "No you didnt just.. No, just no" is a welcome change, even if the quests themselves are often depressingly typical.

AoC has a unique, and worthy of much praise and outright copycatting, system for solo players. There is an option to switch to a set of interlinked quests described as "Destiny" quests, and the fact that it involves the game sucking you into what amounts to your own instance of the game world is wonderfully woven into the game world itself. During the day, you are in the shared world, interacting with hundreds of other players on your server and taking quests meant for all kinds of players. Check in with the person who gives out your destiny quests, and you are sent to the same areas at night, where its just you and the bad guys, and the plot is more tightly woven to the type of character your playing.

I dont know if that solo style lasts past level 20 (the first 20 levels basically being the training wheels portion of the game). I hope it does, in some capacity, because its an excellent device, and it gives less-than social players such as myself something to do in the game that feel rewarding.

So, I like this game, its nice to look at, good sound, excellent writing. Conan is a beloved IP, so high marks for executing that well. But I may not end up playing AoC, even though WAR has been delayed multiple times.

So, the not-so-good and even the bad.

First, Rated M for Mature does not mean mature people play this game. It was a controversial move on the part of AoC to go for the M rating, but I had approved of it for a couple of reasons, and added another reason after I played for a bit. Conans world is violent, sexy, and crude, and an M lets the developers be completely true to that. And the developers did not pass up that opportunity. By going with an M, they limited their market, but the market they limited themselves is far more likely to have the kind of machine needed to play this game, so in the end that was a good deal. We get pretty graphics and some much vaunted nudity, gore, and foul language, and AoC still gets the audience it wanted.

But even if the person on the other side is 43, having them run up to your female character (who's only armor happens to be a tattered shirt you scavenged off some dead Picts corpse in the jungle, what with you washing up on the beach damn near nude and all) and repeatedly screaming "NICE NIPPLES BITCH" is off putting. Yah okay, my character is nipping out a bit, thanks for pointing that out. Now shoo, the grownups want to play this game.

The saddest part of behavior like that is, the open beta has the more naughty bits on the female characters covered or removed. Some nipples through a shirt (or, on some of the female models, the shape of the nipples are still there in the nude, but they are the same color as the rest of the characters skin) are about all your getting. And if that kind of thing is enough to get you all tingly, nothing stops you from just making your own character, swinging the camera around, and going to town. So if this is the kind of thing one can expect in the actual game (and I ran into it enough that it drove me a little crazy) where theres actual nudity, well... it might not be worth wading through that just for some good writing.

I havent really touched on gameplay much, and thats because theres nothing really to say here. The open beta barely gives you a taste of overall gameplay, and what it does let you see, is pedestrian. There is the much hyped combat system, but in PvE it just reduces to madly clicking some buttons for the most part. The actual strategy in PvE is very shallow (some mobs attack both slowly and predictably enough for you to adjust your "shields" to react, but for the most part you have 2 or 3 guys on you, and you cant afford to leave any portion uncovered. Your getting hit everywhere. There is some potential for skill in PvP to play a huge role, but I suspect instead that PvP will be dominated by the Ranger (ranged-damage badass with the ability to stealth) and possibly the Tempest (full up tank with heavy armor and attack spells, some of which life-tap to heal you). Carefully selecting where to hit those two types of characters in PvP, and taking the time to adjust your defenses, is probably not going to make any difference at all as they spam their techniques until you die. Certainly, I couldnt make it so.

The rest of gameplay (spells, agro, skill use) is pretty much MMO standard. Its neither a plus nor a minus, MMOs are starting to mature as a gametype, and just as I dont complain about the WASD model for controlling your character being standard, I dont complain about mages getting some nukes, some DoTs, and some snares.

But it doesnt draw me irresistibly to the game the same why some of the mechanics in WAR do.

I could go on, but over all, Age of Conan is a worthy game, but sadly not something I see sucking up my time between now and the release of WAR. Its lacking some kind of spark for me, which I lament, because Conan is one of my favorite universes.

Perhaps, after the May 20th release, there will be an opportunity for the rest of the game to convince me otherwise. Im certain some people are hooked by the 13 levels we are presented with in the open beta, but the hook just didnt quite stick for me.
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Lost my Bet. I owe myself $10

Well. Countdown is over, announcements have been made, and boy did I lose my bet. No open beta announcement. In a way, we got a release date announcement, but it was just to announce WAR has been delayed again. Sad Panda.

One the other hand, the collectors edition contents WHERE announced, and they do look very choice. This is a collectors edition worth of the name, with a trade collection of all the WAR comics, in hardcover no less; A huge 224 page hardbound artbook; A pair of miniatures (or possibly one combined one) of the Ork Warboss and his Shaman co-boss from WAR; and a truly enormous set of ingame benefits, including a bonus xp item (limited to 3 uses, otherwise could you imagine the howls?), and 12 new: quests, items, titles, and heads.

Lots of goodies in that CE, I want one. Oh, and supposedly a beta key, though a beta key like all the other promotional beta keys, ie: you just get priority, not an instant invite.

Im usually doom and gloom about delays in game, and Im pretty doom and gloom about this delay. But Ive said what I want to about delays. All that I have new for this delay is: After all these delays with the promise of polish, WAR had damn well better be polished when it comes out. This game had best SHINE. MMOs usually have pretty rocky launches, and WAR's popularity promises the kind of launch that WoW experienced. Lots of lag, full servers, etc... but after these delays, I dont think WAR can get away with that kind of thing. You cant say "polish, make it better, polish" through three delays and then release a game that trips out of the gate. I doubt WAR would ever fall down on any facet, even the launch, but at least MY tolerance for mistakes decreases with every announced delay...
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War Countdown

There is an intriguing countdown on the Warhammer Europe site. There was a leak of the Collectors Edition box and preorder information from a German site. My bet? We get both the open beta start date and the actual release date for Warhammer Age of Reckoning in a little more than 3 days.

I havent done a post on WAR in a while, because things have only come out in dribbles. But the game is looking very solid. I had commented before on how each class has a mechanism that sets the "pacing" of that class, from the Bright Wizards Combustion (spells which generate a lot of combustion critical more often, but get to much combustion and you damage yourself) to the Chosen's and Knights auras (and the "twisting" that would go with that, asking the player to choose how much they can be bothered to increase their own effectiveness), to a Witch Elves Frenzy, a counter stat that gateways combos, each class has a process that allows a player to inject skill into the usually static and predictable interactions of an MMORPG.

For a game centered on RvR (PvP by a less onerous name), having _every_ class have such a mechanism is critical. When only a few classes are able to be moved by skill, conflict between players will be skewed towards those classes, all other things being more or less equal. A good example of how that can occur would be Rogues and Druids in WoW. The ability to plan out sequences that quickly unlocked the high damage, high effect finishing moves was the mark of a skilled Rogue, and the inability of most other classes to do anything similar meant that Rogues could know with high precision which fights they could win, and which they should avoid. And there where only a few fights for them to avoid, given how much more effective an efficient combo made them. WAR avoids that problem, though it may run into others, by letting every class have the opportunity to increase their effectiveness through careful planning and experience playing that class.

WAR added in open world RvR Keeps, pretty much verbatim (with improvements based on feed back) from DAoC. This is actually a good thing, because the keep fights are central to DAoC, and one of its best features. WAR has also borrowed the concept of masteries from DAoC, and I have yet to decide if the changes made in the translation actually make the mastery paths a good thing. I think it is pretty much a given, in any modern MMO, that you will have "specializations" within a class, but as WoW made obvious (but as DAoC and other MMOs suffered from long before), it is very easy to get the balance of specializations, both within a class, and between classes, wrong. Fortunately, WAR will have no official forums, so at least there wont be one consolidated place for everyone to whine in.

Because the fastest way to grow to hate a game is to read its forums. Which is sad, because learning from other players is the best way to improve your own game, but the price of finding what good advice there might be out there can be high.

What is going to make WAR into an exceptional game, however, is going to be the world that you actually play in, and recent announcements have given me great hope for the interactivity, depth, and atmosphere of that world. Explorers will be rewarded, and rewarded well, through the Tome of Knowledge, gaining morale abilities, titles, and even boosts to abilities based on what they find off the beaten path. And as icing, exploring will even have risk, as the dark corners of areas will have vastly out of level encounters to lure back high level players to zones they may have long since outgrown. Adding to the explorers fun, if you somehow manage to work your way into a part of the world that you are not, technically, supposed to be able to get to, rather than punish you, the game will "Plunger" you back to a safe area, and a notation in the Tome of Knowledge will be made of your accomplishment. This is utterly unique in MMOs, most of whom either ignore players circumventing the design of the environment, or actually ban players who do so. Couple all of this with the dark humor and grim fantasy of the Warhammer world, and even the PvE for this game sounds like it will be a blast.

It all comes down to execution now, and if they DO announce a release date in 3 days, it will be because EA Mythic is satisfied that they have a solid game. And Electronic Arts itself will have gone a long way to rehabilitating its normally grim reputation. An EA that actually cares about quality games, and then demonstrates with actions, not just words, that change of heart, is an excellent sign for the gaming industry as a whole. And WAR is where they get to demonstrate that most clearly.

So heres hoping.
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Gary Gygax 1938 - 2008. He will be missed.

Gary Gygax died today, he was having heart trouble according to reports.

Nothing I can say wont already have been said. He was a huge force in the RPG industry, and his unique style of DM'ing still goes by the term "Hardcore" in my circle of friends today, 34 years later. Ive been playing D&D in some form for 30 of those years, learning at my mothers side in her D&D campaign. She played a monk (first edition mind you, 17 levels of bad ass), and my brother an I where henchmen. Not even classed. Just normal human henchmen. Some of my best memories involve that time, running through Keep of the Slave Lords, Against the Giants, The Drow series and all the way to the Queen of the Demon Web Pits.

Gamma World, an unabashed space fantasy game in the D&D mold, was Gary Gygax' fault, and I loved it. Mutant cat with levitate, force field, TK and Telepathy, and the time we ran our asses off to escape a honest to the gods Death Bot in its full, 100+ attack glory. We came back for it specific, and it carved up four PCs before going down in a hail of missile fire.

Gary Gygax made that possible. I had the honor to finally meet him, at the roll out of D&D 3.0 after WoTC had bought TSR and there was a chance for some reconciliation. He must have had his faults, for what human doesnt, but he was a great guy with his fans, and that speaks well for his overall character.

I can just see him taking a tour of the planes now. It would be fitting. God bless.

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