Guild Wars 2: The Bad

As mentioned at the end of last post, not all is well in Tyria. Here's some of the not so good stuff.

Poor Instruction
Guild Wars 2 (much like most MMOs) does a lousy job of teaching you how to play. This is not helped by the fact that things change rather frequently. It is not immediately obvious that you don't need to grind to level crafting or that you shouldn't be grinding at all in PvE. It is especially bad about running out of content in the newbie zone. Sure, you can hop over to your nearby racial capital, hit up another newbie zone and have at it (the game even downlevels you to make it more appropriate--not that they tell you that) but if you're new to the game you don't really know that, do you? Anecdotally, my co-workers (and it bears repeating that these are professional game developers) said they couldn't figure out what to do after level 8 or so.

A case in point is the combo system which is super important.  One triggers them by using a "finisher" ability in the presence of a "field" ability. Most classes (professions in GW2) have one or the other typically in great number to only very rarely will they have both. What usually happens is you fire off an ability that does something you want (like shoot at the baddie) and it does something far away like apply burning. At some point you might notice that there's a little combo popup but it's often lost in the effects soup that drowns most encounters. At launch this was especially bad because many of the skill tooltips were broken so you didn't even necessarily know which of your abilities did fields/finishers even if you did know how to make combos work. As a big part of the depth of the game, I would have expected this to be better explained--really, explained at all.

Char 4tw!

Which Rule Set Is This?
SPvP has its own stats, its own specs, and its own rules. This is already rough enough especially for those who only dabble in it which is most people who play if they dabble at all. "Wait, my heal used to go off for 6K, here it's only 4K, what gives?" Oh right, healing is nerfed only in SPvP. "Why can't I get my favorite gear in SPvP?" Oh right, SPvP doesn't have access to all the PvE gear, sorry. Even more confusingly, WvW, which is ostensibly a PvP game mode, uses PvE gear and PvE rules. It's actually not even that easy--it uses some of the PvE rules and abilities but not all of them.  Items usable from your inventory don't work in WvW, mostly because there were some extremely ridiculous items, but if you're not a WvWer this wouldn't be clear at all.

One aspect of being a mostly PvE mode is especially bad when in WvW:  when you die you have to pay a repair cost! There have been times that I couldn't afford to participate in WvW because I was too broke from repairing my gear. Why have they done that? If you wanted to promote large scale battles, wouldn't you want to reduce the already high friction of entering a PvP arena?  Wouldn't you also want your WvW to use the SPvP rules set which is better balanced for competitive play?

To make matters even worse for the game mode I spend the most time in, WvW is starting to get its own exclusive things not available in other game modes.  Some of this is good--people like progression of any kind, but let's remember that WvW is ostensibly a PvP type of game mode.  Progression in WvW is now extremely vertical and not only that it is extremely time dependent.  To get the highest levels of the things that matter requires a huge investment in time (note:  not skill) and most of that investment is sub-par until you get to the last level.  So we end up with the worst of WoW's original PvP ranking system:  those who play more, even if they aren't any good, get the best rewards.  It's actually even worse than that which we'll get into in the next inevitable installment.

Questionable Balance
This is unfortunately a complex subject to begin with and GW2 does its best to complicate it even further. We've already established that the rules are different between modes of play so already not good. I'm sure they have reasons, but when healing is nerfed 50% in SPvP but not in other modes of the game, one wonders what measuring stick they're using to determine which things are too powerful. These questions become even harder to answer when you consider a couple examples.

Case #1: thief burst. D/D thief revolves around getting large bursts of damage from stealth and goes a little something like this. You want to open with Steal which is a very long distance instantaneous teleport which can be specced to do a chunk of damage.  Cloak & Dagger is a melee-range skill that does a chunk of damage and puts the thief into stealth but has a less than a second windup before it hits. Clever thieves realized that once you were in range you could wind up Cloak & Dagger and immediately hit Steal and land both putting you into stealth and then immediately backstabbing the target.

Hardcore is thiefing in the cold in a bath towel.

Typical numbers for me on a non-tanky target were 3K for mug, 4K for C&D, and 6K for backstab.  Most non-tanky targets only have around 15K hitpoints.  So within the span of a second, the target is either down or really, really unhappy.  In the latter case, it's almost trivially easy to start spamming dagger 2, the hated Heartseeker which is a leap finisher, a gap closer, and an attack rolled into one which does up to 100% more damage if the target is low on health which it probably is because a thief's initial burst is so large.  Mine were good for 5K to 8K crits.  We don't even need Executioner which says it provides 20% more damage if the target is under 50% health which actually doubles or more.  Not what you expected from +20%?  Me neither.  For added deviousness you can use an elite skill that stuns the target for a couple seconds and you can use it to open most every fight.

While it didn't happen often, and I thiefed after orbs were taken out and thieves had already been nerfed to prevent this exact thing, I would regularly down level 80 targets with Mug+C&D+Backstab within half a second. Fun? The designers said this was OK because "there was some play in the combo". I have no idea what that means. While there have been some burst nerfs, a lot of the class was buffed while I was playing.  Now when I thief with my spiffy ascended dagger and a better tuned spec, I backstab for 8K even without executioner.  In the unlikely world where I can also get 100 more power from Guard Leech plus some glassier spec/gear tunes, I can only imagine how ridiculous things could be.

It does not matter how balanced this burst is against anything else you care to measure it against.  It doesn't feel fair and that's why the official boards are alight with "nerf thieves!" posts.  We'll talk about this more in the next installment.

Case #2: movement skills and we'll consider elementalists and warriors. D/D ele is mostly melee range.  Knowing this, the designers have provided three gap closers:  Ride the Lighting (air 4), Buring Speed (fire 3), and Magnetic Grasp (earth 3).  RtL moves very fast up to 1200 range and does a small amount of damage to the target.  CC, especially roots, sloping terrain, and marshmallows placed in an ele's path thwart this ability terribly.  When I started D/D if you went down a slope, it would trigger the falling damage and kill you.  This is exactly what you want in a gap closer, right?  Burning Speed is much the same thing except a) it works, b) it leaves a trail of fire (field, actually), does a lot more damage, and has a much shorter range (600).  Magnetic Grasp is interesting because it pulls the ele to the target (range 900 as a leap finisher--told you combos were important) now that they've fixed it to actually work.

Switching gears, one of a warrior's formidable arsenal is the greatsword as one might expect.  Whirlwind Attack (GS 3) spins this giant meat cleaver of a blade like an olympic hammer toss windup, does a pile of damage, and propels the warrior 450 units ahead.  Rush (GS 5) sends the warrior charging 1200 units ahead and does a pile of damage.  These sound a lot like Burning Speed and Ride the Lighting.  One of the other weapon combos sword/warhorn which a lot of warriors run irregardless of its actual usefulness (another discussion entirely).  Sword's Savage Leap (sword 3) has an 8s cooldown, does a pile of damage, cripples the target if it hits, is a leap finisher, and moves for 600 units.

Looking at these two on paper it seems to be reasonably well balanced.  Warriors can spec to get out of roots/snares on movement attacks so they aren't stuck with warhorn for mobility builds.  Elementalists can swap to water with the right spec to usually get out of the same predicament.  Forget for the moment that warriors automatically have 1.8x the hitpoints and around 10% more armor off the bat because here comes the fun stuff.

Once a lot of the launch bugs were fixed (and there were a lot of them), elementalists started having some success.  The result of that success is that just about every single balancing pass thereafter, elementalists were nerfed in some way, some of which were needed but many seemed to pander to the "nerf elementalists!" crowd.  RtL was nerfed four times:  first the range (1500 to 1200), then the cooldown (15s to 20s), then the cooldown again (20s to 30s) and then finally the cooldown again (back to 20s but up to 40s if you don't connect with anything).  This was done (apparently) because "too many" elementalists could reset a fight by RtL out of dodge, get out of combat, then come back to finish the job.  On the warrior side, there's no penalty if Rush doesn't hit a target, it's never killed a warrior by Rushing down a slope, and it's never gotten nerfed.  No one can catch a GS/sword warrior that's getting out of dodge.  They can reset the fight almost at will with a very high chance of success.  This is part of the reason you will almost never encounter a D/D elementalist in WvW but it is not uncommon to see entire groups composed of warriors.

Even if all other aspects of these two professions were in perfect balance (which they aren't) this would always have caused consternation amongst one camp and ridicule from the other.  The kicker?  This is one of about a dozen such examples that can trivially be given. I don't recall having ever seen a game that claims to support competitive play that fails the eyeball test so frequently or so badly in my many decades of gaming.

Questionable Encounter Design
I like well designed encounters; it's my souvenir from WoW. Guild Wars 2 for the most part does not have well designed encounters.  Once I realized this I started to avoid PvE because it was a point of extreme frustration so I have not seen the inside of most of the instances.  There are two parts that I think contributed to this.  Disclaimer:  if you are PvE aficionado, your mileage will almost certainly vary but as a serious PvPer it drove me nuts.

Most scripted encounters involve a boss, some adds, or a "don't stand in the fire" mechanic.  Occasionally you get a couple of each in different phases.  Not standing in the fire should hopefully go without saying but the damage between encounters for standing in the wrong place ranges from "this circle?  it's not even warm" to "Hellfire of Instant Death (TM)".  It is entirely that random, so unless you know the encounter and religiously read the cryptic patch notes you don't really know what to expect.  Standing in the fire isn't rocket science so minus some dodgy placement and timing issues this is just annoying until you're tagged by one of the "instant death" ones at which point it's maddening.

Adds mostly suffer from the same problems.  Most of the adds you'll get are mooks as you'd expect but occasionally you'll get an add that is vastly more powerful and dangerous.  So again we're in the situation that if you don't know the encounter you don't know to watch out for the Uber-hench and in the middle of the fight you're eating dirt and wondering if anyone got the number of the truck that just ran you over.  Not good.

The really rage-inducing stuff is with bosses.  Most of the boss mechanics are exactly the same:  learn the tell and time your dodge or get downed.  Granted, the downed state in GW2 isn't nearly as bad as being downed (killed) in most MMOs but with healing as comparatively limited as it is and with so many buffs being lost on down, it can be extremely detrimental.  The vast majority of boss tells prior to an attack I've seen are instant death situations even if you're a level 80 beeftank.  In my opinion this is a cardinal design sin:  teaching the player through death.  It's the 21st century--we live in the future for crying out loud--we can do better than this.  Hit 'A' or die is what design hacks do to make themselves feel big and a rookie mistake that doesn't belong in modern gaming.

You hit the first instance, the Ascalonian Catacombs, at level 30.  It's filled with ghosts and some interesting back story.  I have never heard of a level appropriate group completing the instance on story mode on their first try, let alone exploration (hard) mode at 35.  I went in there with people who have been MMOing for as long as there have been MMOs and we wiped repeatedly.  Everyone I've talked to has had the same experience--they walked into the instance expecting to be challenged and gave up hours later with broken gear and empty pockets.  This is not the experience you want to give to players trying your group content for the first time.

Every instance I tried went the same way.  Learn the tell or die.  Even the trash was like this!  It amazed me that every new encounter was my new least favorite encounter.  It was maddening.  You go from nigh unto godlike in the rest of the world to "fleas kill me" in the instances.  This is in a game with no real tanks and no real healers.  It's great when you get it right and endlessly frustrating when you don't.  This leads to some very interesting player behavior.  I'm not convinced that no one likes to play support (mostly because I do) but because most of the encounters are so unbelievably brutal so much of the time, the vast majority of the player base always plays glass cannon builds to the exclusion of everything else.  Why?  The encounters are shorter so there's a better chance that they win because they have fewer opportunities to miss key dodges and it's not like it matters if they're tanky anyway--they're still downed in one.  As we'll discuss in the next section, this is not entirely healthy for the game.

Guild Wars 2: The Good

As many of you probably know, I've spent quite a lot of time with Guild Wars 2. I've even said that it's probably the best game I've played in the last few years. I'm mostly done (as done as you can be with a free to play game, anyway) so I figured I'd put some words here. As is typical, this will be a rant in two or three pieces. Also as typical, these are my own opinions having played probably too much. YMMV.

Brilliant Environments

I knew I should have brought an umbrella...

All games released in the AAA space are required to have well built environments--it's what it means to be AAA after all. GW2 is no different in this aspect. At relatively high settings the game can be downright beautiful. To show off some of the more interesting spots, the game even adds vistas which award experience and a camera cut scene showing off the level designers' work.

The architecture is also very good, specifically the ruins. Each race has thier particular style from the Asura's knee high technical gizmos to the sweeping gothic architecture of Humans to the very industrial and steampunk-y Charr. Ruins are all over the place since that's typically where the best adventures are to be found. A lot of effort has been given to making everything interesting and believable with a consistent level of detail and polish. It makes even simple treks through an area a lot more interesting.

Beyond the more normal environments one might encounter (snow, desert, forests, etc.) there are also two destruction-oriented environments. The Brand is purple crystal themed where the resident dragon is corrupting the area. Then there's Orr which is underwater themed with barnicles and corals aboveground where the resident dragon is corrupting the area. There's also undead there. A LOT of undead.

Good Character Models

Bandit's got my back.

A lot of the character models are very good and not just the player models. Most of the game seems to be hand animated and the attention to detail shows. The game also uses IK an awful lot which usually gives very realistic poses, though not always. This means that motion and idles, the two things that are most likely to show flaws, are fluid and interesting and make the world feel more real.

Player faces in particular can be very good. I spent an inordinate amount of time (and money!) in the character creator. This is good since much like SW:TOR you see yourself a lot in the single player story mode.  While it isn't impossible to see your twin out in the world, it happens way less frequently than in, say, Rift.

There's also a huge variety of gear and everything can be re-skinned. Each race has their own fashion which I think is a nice touch. Some of it is attached to one time or seasonal events and available for a limited time only which helps break up the same-ness you tend to see in these sorts of games as time wears on. While not all the armor is believable, it isn't difficult to piece together armors that are and look nice.

Large Footprint

They couldn't stop the three of us.

There is quite a lot to do in the game. Each of the zones has a completion bonus and there's an additional
completeness reward for exploring the entire world. Crafting is formulaic but based on experimentation rather than grinding--a nice touch. There's a solo story which follows your character through various choices leading to a climactic ending. Soloing getting boring? There are public quests that spawn in the game world some of which are quite complex and properly difficult. There is even a team dedicated to building "Living World" updates which happen every few weeks so there's always something new.

PvP-wise we're not wanting either. Structured PvP is more like arenas and FPS maps with simple objectives. In structured, all players are level capped, all stats are standardized, and builds are completely separate. World vs. world is more like Realm vs. Realm in DAoC where your character keeps their PvE gear and build. Objectives in WvW range from solo-able to requiring a significant force to take. Large scale combat is frequent in WvW some for better and some for worse. SPOILER ALERT: I spent most of my time in WvW and I'll have a lot to say about it in future installments.

Action-y Combat
GW2 hugely limits the number of abilities that are available compared to most MMOs. The main skill bar has ten slots--five weapon skills, a heal skill, three utilities, and an elite skill. Weapon skills are determined by the main and offhand weapons and most professions have a swap of some sort, either to an additional set of weapons or to a different layout in some other way.

Most classes have either or both of gap closers and movement skills. This means that combat can be initiated very quickly since the typical long run up to stand in an opponent's face for melees is not usually required. On the flip side, long range nukers can often keep enemies at distance either using quick getaway skills (elementalist fire staff 4 shoots them backward leaving a trail of fire) or by knocking the opponent down or back (ranger longbow 4 knocks the target back a considerable distance).

The best part of GW2's action-y combat is active dodging.  With this one addition, everything about combat changes. Opponent burn their dodges too early? Wind up your big attack because they probably can't avoid it. Boss cranking out stupid damage? Save your dodges to negate the effect. It's difficult to put into words how much this one feature adds to the gameplay but for me it makes everything much more enjoyable. I felt a lot more in control of my characters and their (typically) dangerous situations than ever before. While games can probably be good without an active dodge mechanic, I don't know if they can ever be as good. GW2 has completely ruined my expectations here--any game that doesn't have an active dodge now feels dated.  This is not without its issues which we will discuss in a later installment.

Reasonable Complexity
Games these days tend to be fairly shallow, especially MMOs and those in the AAA space. This is because games have to be approachable and inoffensive like a cheap Scotch in order to sell the most copies. GW2 doesn't have a subscription model and not everyone buys stuff at their cash shop. So one would expect that the game would pander to the lowest common denominator--people who just can't handle not being handed a new shiny every time they fall over. While I think that GW2 could use more complexity, a topic which we will discuss in great detail later, I think it does pretty well despite itself.

Active dodges add complexity. You get the typical spec, armor, and weapon builds that we expect from this kind of game. There's also combos where one player puts down a field and another can execute a finisher in it for big effects like shooting fire bolts everywhere or doing an AoE heal. There are also a lot of short-duration group buffs which, if done correctly and at the right time can make bad situations manageable and heavily rewards experienced players--PvP especially.

But All Is Not Well
No game is perfect and GW2 is no exception. Next time we'll talk about the stuff that isn't so good.

Muhh....whuuu?

I suppose this is how all blogs go--updated frequently in the beginning then kind of petering out near the end until someone stops paying the bills and then lights out! It seems that 2007 was a particularly good year and the last couple...err...not so much. I could say I'll be updating more frequently but TBH that's not exactly a high bar to set is it? How many of those links on the right even work?

Most days I don't even remember I have a blog despite the fact that it's on my business card. Luckily no one but Aaron Melcher actually reads anything here (HI AARON! GET BACK TO WORK!) I'm only here because in the course of going through some backups, I found the predecessor to this blog circa 1998-2002. That was before blogging had even been invented! I'd post some of that stuff here but it's rather embarrassing, much like my spelling. And my art.

I'd like to make an excuse and say that this year has been pretty busy but it kind of hasn't. My tortuous involvement in A:CM had pretty much wrapped up by February. Then there were a couple conferences (woo, new hardware)! I was "busy" with GW2 until like June but that doesn't really count (G:B:U posts on the way). Then there was this build which got quite a lot of press. She showed well at BrickFiesta and took "Best Space--Large" which puts me at 3/3 at Lego events. That was the beginning of July.

Now I've mostly been revisiting some stuff I've been putting off, like moving in and such. Now that I have time I've been going through my (vast) collection of mostly ancient hardware to see what works, what doesn't, and what I'd need to build a robot army to take over the world what parts I need to make what I've got functional. It always amazes me how well hardware ages.

I've also been BBQing which is way more fun than it sounds. Now that I live in Texas, I figure it's allowed--required even. I purchased a Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker which is serving me quite nicely. Many pork butts and "Pork Ribs, St Louis Style" later I think I've gotten the hang of it. Next weekend I hope to do my first beef brisket (again, Texas). Shit. Now I want BBQ.

That more or less brings us up to today. If I'm feeling especially frisky this week I'll try to clean some of this stuff up. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you, tho.

2012 in Review

So 2012 has come and gone with nary a world-ending apocalypse. Despite that, things have been a little nuts for me what with changing jobs and moving. The new digs are nice but the new gig is rough. I was still able to get some quality gaming in which went a little something like this...

Star Wars: The Old Republic ***
I did play this for a substantial time this year and I was hoping that it would age well. Unfortunately it didn't as you can read in my lengthy review a couple posts back. Now that it's free to play I may revisit it at some point but I haven't yet.

Borderlands ****
I'm usually late to the party with shooters but my involvement with BL2 spurred me on to finally check out the original. I have to say that I'm sad that I missed it when it was new. It's pretty much a straight up shooter but with a funky style and a dark humor that really sets it apart. I really miss the humor of the, say, late 80s to early 90s Sierra games from the Bad Old Days(TM) and Borderlands kicked the point home.

Mount & Blade: Warband ***
Yeah, I reviewed this one last year too but I played a lot of it this year. I finally got to the end of the game but having had a second run at it I got a better feel for the mechanics and how the AI was constructed. I still think some of the original worked better than the sequel but can still recommend it for anyone who wants to see how mounted combat should be done.

Endless Space ****
I love 4X games but they generally don't get a lot of press. Endless Space takes a lot of what I liked out of GalCiv and wraps it in a new shiny package without a lot of the bad stuff that didn't work. When I played it around release there were quite a few balance issues and the interface was in places clunky. Overall, however, it was a lot of fun and had some fantastic music to boot.

Mass Effect 3 ****
I am an unabashed Mass Effect fan. The first installment while being not the best of games had a fantastic story not unwilling to dive into some of the hardercore sci-fi topics. The second traded a lot of story for gameplay so I was a little worried about the last chapter in Shepard's story. The game unfortunately came out while I was at GDC and I moved right after that so didn't get to see what all the uproar about the ending was. I mean, this is Bioware, right? They can write good stuff, right? As it turns out, we apparently can't trust them with an ending. Lots of people have said lots of things about this a lot better than I can. Mass Effect 3 is a fantastic game and it's easy to lose sight of that given how utterly the last ten minutes of the game ends. I give them props for sticking to their guns throughout the entire backlash but honestly, they could have picked better guns. The extended cut helps substantially but this is NOT how you end an epic trilogy.

FTL: Faster Than Light ****
This is a pretty high production value indie game which was sold to me as "roguelike meets dwarf fortress in space". I don't think I'd go that far though it does have elements of both. What it does have is some very polished 8-bit style art and some mesmerizing midi-style music that wrap a solid design. It's a fast game, one that you can get through in a couple hours but it can be brutal at times and it's not uncommon to get to the last boss without a chance of success. That's my only real reservation from giving it *****--it's a little too old-skool roguelike in its eagerness to hit you over the head with bad RNG picks and utter failure.

Guild Wars 2 *****
I never played the original Guild Wars so I wasn't exactly following GW2's development. In fact, I probably wouldn't have played it at all if someone hadn't mentioned that if you pre-order you can get into the beta. Thus I ended up with probably the best sixty gaming bucks I've ever spent (plus another $80 in their cash store plus another $200 in hardware). GW2 is easily the best game I've played in 2012 and probably best in the last five years. The game isn't without flaws (no game is) but the majority of it is so well done that I think it sets the new bar for gaming excellence in the MMO space. I'll almost certainly have a longer write up at some point--once I can tear myself away from it.

In Review
It might seem like a light year for gaming but it really wasn't mostly because M&B and GW2 got long shifts. I didn't get to all the stuff I wanted to (Serious Sam, Deus Ex, Portal 2, Halo 4 and XCom among others) but quality game time was had nonetheless. Here's hoping that 2013 is as good.

SWTOR: The Bad

Clearly it can't all be good and you might have guessed that I have some...lengthy criticisms given how much of the not good came through from the previous post. As usual, these aren't in any particular order. Also, like I said in the last post, this stuff didn't get published until well after I'd written it and since I don't play any longer I won't necessarily know if they've fixed any of this stuff. Granted, the game is now free to play now but that isn't enough to get me to spend more time with it yet.

Lack of Meaningful Choices
There are a couple oddities worth mentioning with the voice acting and storytelling. First, if you play through with multiple characters or even go through the same dialogues with different choices, you start to see how thin the veneer of choice actually is. It's pretty clear that they put together scripts so that there were exceptionally few divergent points. In fact, a lot of the time your character's delivered lines for a given conversation differ at only one point. You can give them a pass for this if you like given the sheer volume of script that there is, but I think it falls a little short all things considered. It's as if they ticked off all the boxes for "absolute minimum needed to go live" and shipped that. If you hype story as the fourth pillar of your new blockbuster, I think you kind of have to deliver a little more than that.

*MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD* As a trooper you encounter a particular operative a couple times in the early game. A few levels later you're on a station with a bunch of hostages held by The Bads(TM). This same operative helps you onto the station to deal with the situation. As the mission unfolds you're presented with the "decision" to vent the lower decks spacing this poor operative or rescuing the operative and leaving the hundreds of hostages to their doom. These situations arise all the time in Mass Effect but in that game it usually comes with additional trappings--either a personal relationship with the individual or understanding a larger galactic need the significance of the hostages. The writers on those projects convey decisions with weight. When the operative is so un-memorable I can't remember her name or whether the hostages were useful in any way I think it works a lot less well. It becomes even worse if you're a gamer and know that a lot of compelling end-game gear is keyed to being either full light side or full dark side. In Mass Effect I would often choose renegade options when I thought they fit the character I played but armed with this information I always picked the light side choices in SWTOR even when they were lame.

Short Content
All told you can get through a single character's story line and most of the soloable content in about four weeks of reasonable playtime. Anyone who's played these kinds of games before can get a few levels every couple hours until the last few levels--the leveling curve is awfully kind. Furthermore, because things are usually in hubs that send you to the same areas, you tend to not spend a lot of time in any one place. When you finish in one area there's a breadcrumb quest to get you to the next. This seems like a Good Thing(TM) given the more streamlining "modern" MMOGs, but we'll revisit some of the downsides of this design soon.

To make matters worse, additional characters largely go through the same content unless you roll on the other side. My best guess is that around 20% of a character's active game time is spent on class-specific quests so re-rolling on the same side means doing most of the same stuff. The game is also frustratingly linear since aside from the starter zones, there is typically ONE zone in which to quest for a given level band. That means that successive playthroughs will have you doing most of the same stuff in roughly the same order in exactly the same places you've already been. WoW, for all of its shortcomings, usually had other places to go if, for instance, you absolutely couldn't stand Silverpine.

Questionable Endgame
So you've hit 50. Awesome, now what? If you've played mostly solo like most people, that means solo grinding daily missions. These can be handled pretty easily in a couple hours per character. I ran through these on three characters until it didn't make a lot of sense to do them anymore--that's a lot of the same boring missions. The stuff you'll get is OK but not exceptional in any way and is easily overshadowed by the gear you'll pull out of instances.

If you do instances, you'll be doing a lot of instances. As has been en vogue for a while now, some subset of the normal level-appropriate instances have a hard mode that scale to max level and are generally harder. I can't recall with certainty if they add additional bosses but I also didn't see them all, either. Also en vogue, hard mode instances drop tokens that you can turn in for gear at an extremely unfavorable rate. If you liked the instances and had a reasonable regular group this wasn't so bad. If you (like me) disliked the instances and didn't have a reasonable regular group, this was terribly disappointing.

You and seven or fifteen your close personal friends could instead chose to raid. I understand that this was a much better way to gear out your character (though for what I couldn't tell you) since the drops/tokens were far more frequent and generally completed much more expediently. I can't say for sure, however, since I never ran them having neither seven nor fifteen close personal friends who stuck with the game.

I also can't talk about PvP because I didn't find it enjoyable enough to pursue. It is notable that the open-world version of PvP on Ilum, the top end zone was horrifically broken when the first wave of people were capping and looking for something to do. As a large number of the play callers at Bioware that did SWTOR are ex-Mythic people, they really ought to have done better.

Annoyances
Lots of games have these; MMOs usually in spades. What makes SW:TOR's especially awful is that they get in the way of gameplay in ways that you can't easily ignore. It's as if they wanted to hang onto terrible MMO tropes out of a misguided sense of nostalgia. Whatever the reasoning, these things need to die a fiery death:

Mail works instantly everywhere except for auctions--the one thing that I really want to be instant. Extra demerits for sending me mail saying that my auction has sold and then updating its contents at a much later time in the same mail. I'm fairly certain I lost cash-money by deleting a seemingly worthless notification mail.

Mail is available just about everywhere in the world except the one place I really want to receive it: my ship. I get my mail on my phone in meatspace. I don't think it'd be a stretch to have it delivered to my ship in a universe full of hyperspace travel and laser guns.

Travel points aren't named the same as recall points as the areas you're in. This makes it especially difficult to determine where you're supposed to go to deliver the fobnob to Dr. Cranky.

You can't make a complete crafter on one character. You need two gathering skills and one production skill and one random skill that isn't otherwise helpful that feeds you blueprints--pick three. Whereas I'm on record as saying that this can be helpful in long-lived games because it can increase the sense of community, in a game like SW:TOR with maybe two months of content, it just annoys me.

You can fast travel from anywhere in the world to the fleet once a day with a fleet pass. You occasionally encounter a shuttle that can take you from a designated area, usually a quest hub, to one particular instance. However! That same shuttle can't pick you up in the field to go to the instance you're going to--that would clearly be too easy.

There doesn't seem to be any consistency between instance lengths. Some of them like Esseles are very short. Some of them like Taral V are exceptionally long. Some of these you revisit multiple times as hard-modes at 50 but not always the long ones. This leads to...

There are some very long runs post-wipe. It's bad enough we just got worked by whatever bug or questionable mechanic you just foisted upon me. Don't make me run eight minutes back so I can try again. That's just inconsiderate.

I like hard content (really). What I don't like is when the mechanic is stupidly opaque or an insta-kill if you miss your fire dance by a step. Most raiders expect to learn through death but no one else likes that. If it isn't something that most people can pick up in a couple tries, it might be too obscure or too difficult.

Guys--it's the 21st century. We can do better than this.

Lack of Customization
So you got to 50 and you did your instance grind and now you've got all your fancy gear. Guess what? You now look like everyone else who plays your class that did the same. You might not have the ultra-uber cool white or magenta crystals for your blaster/saber but if you're best in slot you otherwise all look the same. Pair this with the very limited palette of voices, builds, and faces and you get an end-game that is seemingly full of clones.

This already isn't fine and good but a lot of the fashion is also incredibly bad. I thought LoTRO had the Worst Hats In All of MMO-dom(TM) but apparently SWTOR needed to do one better. The top end gear (at least when I played) all looked pretty bad except (maybe) the Trooper gear. Special nod goes to the Jedi Consular whose gear looked especially cringe-worthy.

A New Hope
One of my big hopes for the game was that they'd take the Jedi and Sith ideals and show the greys. Some of the writing in this regard is very good. MOAR SPOILERS If you take the right conversation choices with Lord Scourge, it's pretty clear that he's a dyed-in-the-wool Sith but also an honorable opponent. You might not agree with his philosophy but he had a point: it was all going to shit if the Emperor wasn't destroyed and you (the strapping hero) would put an end to him. I thought it was some of the better writing in the game...until you get near the end and he starts to be a 2D cutout; a caricature of a bad guy in a good spot trying to prevent the universe from ending.

In actuality the game polarizes characters' actions because the majority of decision points are also polarized: you're either kissing babies or kicking puppies; there's not a lot of middle ground. I think that's unfortunate. I think it's doubly unfortunate because other aspects of the game design punish characters who try to walk a middle ground, end-game gear being the most notable example. You kind of expect to see more Jolee Bindos and Magnetos. The Jedi code is pretty strict but heralds Mace Fucking Windu who created a fighting style that walks in the shadow of The Dark Side(TM). Where'd that stuff go?

Parting Thoughts
As of this writing, it's been a good couple months close to a year since I last played so these thoughts may not be as cogent as they probably should be. (For context, I've also moved nearly 2000 miles away and have started a new job.) While I don't regret my time spent in game OR the expensive Ultimate Collector's Super Saiyan Edition(TM) I bought, I have to say I'm disappointed that it couldn't really hold my attention for more than a couple months. I saw a lot of what the game had to offer, but much like Rift, it just didn't have any real staying power.

You've probably heard this from me before, but it bears repeating again:

Kel's First Law of MMOGs:
A game that's easy to pick up is also easy to put down.

I'm on record as saying that SW:TOR was everything I expected and nothing that I hoped and I think that's about the best note I can leave it on.

SWTOR: The Good

I have a love/hate relationship with SW:TOR. Some of it is very good. Some of it is very bad. A lot of it is very meh. This is a gathering of my thoughts having now played three characters to cap--take that for what it is. I might also point out that most of this was written in March of 2012 when I was still actually playing. You might note that it is now well after that March so some of this stuff may be outdated. I will, however, stick to my comments about the game's future given crap like this.

Storytelling
I'm on record as agreeing with Yahtzee--Bioware doesn't get points for good writing anymore. I might be convinced to make an exception this time for their sheer audacity to not only insist that story is a necessary and missing part of modern MMOs, but to also bet the bank on it. Given that almost no one bothers to read the text in most quest pop-ups, this can't have been an easy sell. I think it works out OK for the most part barring some interface issues, and I think they've done a good job of weaving a tale worth watching. I'm especially appreciative of how they've taken many of the same elements and woven them together across classes--pretty cool. Their story implementation is, like most things, a double-edged sword and we'll revisit this topic in a later post.

Voiceovers
I was pretty skeptical of the "every line spoken" thing, but in practice it works out pretty well. Overall the voice acting is pretty good, but this is expected for a game from the studio that brought you KOTOR, the Mass Effects, and the Dragon Ages. As with all voice acting, there's no real accounting for taste. I, for instance, couldn't stand the female Jedi Knight voice--I didn't think it fit. On the other hand, I couldn't consider playing a male Trooper since the female trooper is voiced by Jennifer Hale (of Commander Shepard fame, among other fantastic roles). I think this helps bring the player closer to the game which while I personally didn't find terribly useful, I can appreciate what they were going for.

Reasonably Meets Expectations
Like it has for the last bajillion Internet Years(TM), WoW sets the standard for what we expect on the whole for an MMO. SW:TOR does a pretty good job of meeting these, if in an extremely unpolished way. I thought Rift did a tremendously better job of this and I will probably still hold that up as the gold standard of launches until The Industry(TM)(R)(esq) proves me wrong. SW:TOR meets expectations, I suppose, if you're old and crotchety like I am and don't really expect much. You've got a crafting system which we'll delve into in the next section, your typical healer/tank/dps trinity, and a UI that most of the time delivers what you need even if it does so without any gusto or panache.

A New Take on Crafting
Crafting in SW:TOR is in the form of crew skills. You basically get three picks, only one of which can be a "maker" skill with the other two typically support gathering skills. Of these two gathering skills, only one of them provides things that can be found in the world. The other requires skilling up while sometimes producing resources. Naturally, those resources are the ones you need to make interesting items. The mechanic is also pretty intersting. As your crew grows (more or less as you gain levels) you get more and more companions that you can send off on crafting missions. These can either be gathering missions where they (potentially) return with something useful, or "build things" missions where they (again potentially) return a crafted item. As the levels get higher, the wait gets longer but it's generally OK because you can only really have one companion with you at a time and most people roll exclusively with one companion for a long period of time.

What I like about this system is that it takes away one of the worst things about crafting: not being able to adventure while you're doing so. I can be out in the field sending my companions off to make a cool thing which is then delivered to my inventory when it's completed. That's pretty useful. It's still gated on time but, generally speaking, it's not all that difficult to keep crafting levels up with your adventuring levels so long as you're not completely broke. It's all still gated on time, but I'm not forced to watch the (very slow) bar move like a lot of games. I like that.

Stylized Characters
Love it or hate it, WoW is very stylized which has worked tremendously in their favor. SW:TOR too is stylized though I suspect for different reasons. You can, if you're patient, come up with some very attractive characters and that's time well-spent because you'll see a lot of yourself in cutscenes. I wouldn't mind having some reasonable hairstyles (44 choices and nothing really that great) and maybe more than four body types, but I can see why they might have done that. The downside is that a lot of the characters look a lot a like. It's weird seeing your doppleganger in any game (Rift for all of its good points was terrible for this), but it's especially glaring when not only do they look the same, but they also sound the same in an up-close cutscene delivering some of the dialog.

There's also a point to be made about the gear visualizations. We rather expect a Jedi Knight to look a lot like Ben Kenobi roaming the desert in his brown robe and hooded face. Likewise we expect our troopers to look a lot like the guys from the Clone Wars; good or bad. The game delivers pretty well on these looks. This, like most of their decisions is also a double-edged sword since if you don't like the look the designers have pre-ordained for your choice of class, then you're kind of out of luck. This is especially true about the hats which we'll discuss in more detail later.

...And That's Kind of It
I like that they tried different stuff--I really do, but I also think that they could have done much, much better with a nine digit budget. This goes doubly so considering how many of my former MMO-vet co-workers worked on that project.

A Wanderer Again

I've been in the Boston area now for just over three years. In that time I've worked with some very good people and a small number of not good people (I leave determining which is which as an exercise for the reader). I'll miss the cool people for certain. The rest of the state can sod off. And now, on to Texas.

2011 In Review

In what is becoming a somewhat unintended tradition, here is 2011 in review. I'm still in the same place for now the third consecutive year which is a record of some sort. Otherwise, a pretty uneventful year, really but that's not necessarily a bad thing. On to the gaming!

Rift: *****
This is what I want to see out of a new MMO studio: a well realized world with interesting encounters and a lot of player-friendly features. The UI is top notch and the launch was exceptional and I may have already talked about it some. The only major downsides were that there really was only two months or so of content and I didn't have a reliable crew. I'll give them a pass for the latter, but the former really is inexcusable. I'm told now by people who still play that they've consolidated servers--never a good sign. I enjoyed my time there, however, and it stands as a shining example of how you launch an MMO.

Mount & Blade Warband: ***
A reasonable graphical refinement of the original Mount & Blade with some fun new gameplay additions. Otherwise, they've slowed down the campaign and not fixed a bunch of the terrible game play issues. It does become tedious after a while but I haven't yet felt the need to mod it. Really pretty disappointing if I'm honest.

Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword: **
More of a commercial mod with the original engine, they've managed to take all the really broken things and make them worse while also taking out some of the things that made the original game great. One of the notable additions is firearms which is absolutely great if you can get your guys to hit (and one shot) their targets--not real great when the opponent does so to you. I suspect that this is much cooler if you know the fiction it's based on but I don't.

Dragon Age: Awakening: ***
A pretty reasonable expansion for Dragon Age--enjoyable but with a couple pretty jarring flaws. You can import your old character from Dragon Age: Origins in Mass Effect style which is great...unless your character died at which point no one (yourself included) seems to be aware of it. No really notable characters (I can barely remember any of them, TBH) and while the story was good, as Yahtzee likes to point out, Bioware doesn't get points for that anymore.

Dragon Age 2: ***
Mixed bag here. On the one hand, it's a pretty good standalone RPG with a very good storytelling presentation (even if the story itself wasn't up to Bioware standards). On the other hand, it had to follow Dragon Age: Origins which IMO was hands down better. DA2 was set in the same world but with totally different characters and only the vaguest of tie-ins with the original Anders notwithstanding. It also broke up the world into terribly disjoint areas which you moved between with very little attachment. The characters were interesting but really lacked the standout Shale or HK-47 that we've come to expect though Merrill and Aveline get honorable mention.

Serious Sam III: ****
I am an unabashed Serious Sam fan since the original when working on my first title people kept saying "you can't just make a shooter where you shoot monsters". Since then they've made exactly a game where all you do is shoot monsters, usually a pile of them. The environments are detailed, the monsters are ugly, the levels are unbelievably well designed, and the one-liners are on point. Sam Stone is a better Duke Nukem than the Duke himself. While I don't usually like to review games I haven't finished yet, unless it takes an uncharacteristic turn for the worse, I think I'm going to be pretty happy with it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: ***
And this would be why I haven't finished it yet. I'm on record as wanting this game to succeed because if it doesn't, it probably marks the end of the big-budget MMOs--the kinds of games that I really like. Unfortunately, I think it falls short despite poaching a lot of people who should know better from a former employer (formerly Mythic Entertainment). SWTOR's approach to story telling is largely instanced and is probably the logical extension from LoTRO's method which is nice but the high points are pretty spread out probably due to the sheer volume of content. The voicing is also a nice addition but that comes with good and bad (female jedi knight & male jedi consular: painful). On the downside, there are a LOT of bugs, the game hurts (a lot) for a lack of multi-specs and customizable UI, and minus the thin per-class quest line there is almost zero replayability per faction. I can't shake the feeling that they needed another 6 months to sort out some of the rough edges and if I'm honest, I think I would have preferred to get KOTOR 3 instead. We'll see what the end game's like, but I suspect I'm going to be disappointed.

You'll thank me later.

 No, seriously. Watch that.

Programmer Art

If you've been here before, you probably know that I still have art pretension.  This is Faith from Afterlife Blues which is illustrated by a coworker.

Original resolution was something like 1500x3600 done almost entirely in ArtRage.  This is the only reasonable piece I've done since...er...last March.

BrickFair 2011

BrickFair 2011 is officially over.  This time I knew what I was getting myself into and went in better prepared.  For those who don't frequent my flickr stream, I completed SHIP #4 in July, the Jaguar-class BCL. She was built in about 300 hours over the course of about two months topping the scales at around 40 pounds and ~8,000 pieces. The ship deconstructs into about 100 large-ish pieces that all fit into the nice car which sadly I didn't end up taking. Five hours of reconstruction on site and she was ready for show. I also took four fighters: two of these guys and one each of these.

And what a show it was! It amazes me that Lego people are so goshdarned awesome, pretty much as a rule. I got to catch up with some old pals and got to meet some awesome new ones (do follow the links--those guys do amazing work). It was good times dampened only by being pretty hung-over from a bottle of expensive scotch that I shouldn't have bought. To top it all off, the Jag took the award for "Best in Space" which is both awesome and unexpected. I'm already thinking of all the fun-cool-sweet stuff that I want to build now that the event is winding down. Scheduling gods willing, I'll be back next year in good form.

Rift: The Bad

No game is without its flaws, and Rift is no different.  As always, your mileage may vary.

Steep Learning Curve
Most games of this type suffer from this kind of thing mostly because they are fairly complex.  That's to be somewhat expected.  The Ascended system takes this the next logical step.  In other games you choose your class, maybe bits of your spec, and you're on your way.  At the very beginning of Rift you pick your first soul.  You've already picked a class and now there's more to choose?  Worse yet, you're picking from a largish list with only the barest of information.

One of the strengths of the game is its customizabiliy so it's hard for me to single it out in this installment.  On the other hand, it is tremendously confusing for anyone who a) isn't hardcore, and b) hasn't done a mess of research about the game before hand, and c) has played other games in the genre  I got this stuff all sorted in beta but as part of the head start program, a very large number of the people in my guild had not.  These are some of the frequently asked questions:

• Q:  Am I stuck with the souls I picked?  A:  no, you can pick up all the souls at level 13 through quests.
  
• Q:  How many points do I get to spend in my spec?  A:  66 at level 50; you get one per level and two for every level that's an even multiple of 3.
  
• Q:  How do I get new abilities?  A:  most of the time you get them automagically by spending points in a spec tree (in the root, unlocked by total point count).  Sometimes you can pick them directly in the spec.
  
• Q:  Can I respec?  A:  yes, at the trainer and it's not terribly expensive.
  
• Q:  What is a role and why do I care?  A:  a role is a slot for a single spec.  You can have up to [s]four[/s] five of these so that you can change your character for any particular encounter.
  

There's a lot to know, and the game doesn't do a sufficient job explaining it all to you.  So Joe Nub(TM) gets in there and starts worrying about every decision and/or blindly re-rolling because it isn't clear that almost nothing about your character is permanent.

Misconceptions From Other Games
A better segue, I could not conceive.  What makes the Ascended system hard to get your head around is the fact that it's not really at all like other games.  When you get it all out on the page it's pretty obvious that the devs put some serious thought into not make any given decision painful.  This is not helped by other games in the genre.

For those of you who don't remember the Bad Old Days(TM), let's take a trip down memory lane.  Your class defined/defines everything you can do.  If you're a cleric, you heal and not much else.  If you wear plate, you tank and not much else.  If you can stealth, you DPS but only if no one is hurting you, yadda, yadda, yadda.  We all know the score.  If you could spec (and in a lot of games you couldn't) you were lucky if you could respec--ever, and sometimes it required the killing of a dragon.

As mentioned in the previous post, lots of builds shatter the usual holy trinity's usual cast of characters.  To make matters worse, you can swap it between combats if you so choose!  Unlike in other games where there was a pretty clear cut best choice, Rift allows you supreme flexibility and I like that.  Unfortunately there are a (very) large number of people who a) don't get it, b) don't want to get it, and c) try to impose their Right Way(TM) onto the other players in the game.   Just as the community often made Champions Online bad, the same is also true for Rift, just not to such an extreme level.

Limited Appearance Customization
Most games in the genre have very, very complicated and adjustable faces and/or costumes.  There are usually lots of options and lots of ways to build exactly the face you want, given the time and the inclination.  A lot of times this also means that you can create some terribly horrific looking characters but all in all you don't spend a lot of time looking at your own character's face anyway.

 Rift streamlines this tremendously.  Each {race, gender} pair has a single face with a very limited number of different features to adjust.  The face slider is a triangle with big chunky types at the left, thin types at the right, and square-jawed types at the bottom.  The game lets you pick anything within the continuum and does the appropriate blending in game.  The upshot is that it's very hard to get a character that doesn't look right which I like.  The downside is that it's not uncommon to walk around in the main cities and see many of your identical twins.  I don't like that.

 But it gets worse!  A lot of the gear in the game shares the same art assets.  This is to be expected.  One of the bigger problems is that a lot of the top end gear is identaical but the lower level ones aren't.  In a game where you want top end gear to be aspirational, it's almost criminal for the art between epic tiers to be the same.  Say what you want about the art style but this part isn't so good.

Raid Timers on Expert Dungeons
Expert dungeons are what you might expect:  everything cranked up to 11 in the instances you've already done.  The old bosses have new tricks and there are new bosses to learn.  This is all well and good.  The difficulty curve is relatively easily overcome for competent players.  Personally, I liked the increased difficulty even if it led to some nail-biting and grey hairs.

The bad part is that progression is very much gated on completing expert dungeons so that you can either get the rare dropped upgrade or enough plaques to buy gear but there are one day lockouts on expert dungeons.  Why?  The drops in the expert dungeons aren't spectacular on the whole and until recently you could clear an entire instance and get only blue non-upgrades.  With daily quests giving most all of the plaque rewards there's even less incentive to run them over and over again for a given group.  Worse yet, if your group of friends is oddly sized or isn't immaculately balanced in terms of roles, you can't run it twice to get everyone the rewards.  That stinks.

 If a group goes into a 5-person dungeon and farms the first boss to get X to drop, who really cares?  Was there really a need to make people wait around a day to try again?  These are not raids!  The upgrades are good but  not stellar.  Did there really need to be a lockout?  Sure, you can PUG them, but who wants to do that?  This leads us to...


Lack of Medium Sized Group Content
There is a big difference between doing one group content and raid content.  This is usually in the form of logistics like getting people geared, in the right place, and generally going in the same direction.  It sounds easy but it's not (trust me).  In the best case there's a reasonable stepped progression that makes the bigger things seem more accessible.

Vanilla WoW had a real tough time with this requiring maybe 15 people for an UBRS run and a pretty solid 40 for a serious Molten Core run.  This progression was then fixed (much to my benefit) by adding the Zul'Gurub and Ahn'Qiraj 20 person raids.  That meant a much easier progression with the added benefit that raids usually had better gear moving to the next tier.  Rift until recently, did not have that. Prior to launch Trion said that they had 10 and 20 person versions of all the raids so that if you were in a smallish guild or more casual one that you still had fun things to do.  There were also supposed to be 10 person raid rifts that were appropriately tuned to people not geared for the big raids.  Both of these were cut prior to release.  At the time of this writing, the game has been out for just over 3 months and they're just now adding the 10 person content.  This probably doesn't seem bad until you consider that I hit cap in two weeks and I work full time.

There have been lots of people in small or casual guilds that have already done all of the appropriate 5-person content and have nowhere to go.  Because it doesn't take all that long to hit 50 there isn't as much investment in your characters and thus far less reason to stick around to try to get into the big raids.  Sure, you can do the small number of expert rifts in a raid and get one or two reasonable drops but right now it takes five clears of T1 instances to be able to open one.  It takes ten clears of T2 instances to open a raid rift and you'd better be well geared to have a hope of completing one.  Remember:  you can't run more people through easy experts because of the lockouts so if you're short a healer or tank and/or for whatever reason can't form regular groups, you're kind of out of luck.

As mentioned earlier, the last patch addresses some of these issues.  There are new 10 person raids.  There are also new crafting rifts and they've made expert and raid rifts easier to open.  It looks like there's hope yet, but it remains to be seen if this is enough or if lasting damage has already been done to the playerbase.

The Grind
Rift is an easy game to level in.  I kind of wish it wasn't.  When you get to 50 and aren't in a raiding guild (as in:  most people) you thankfully aren't excluded from gear progression.  The bad part is that gear progression comes in the form of a particularly ugly grind.  If you're like me, you want to see everything so you go through all of the appropriate dungeons more or less at the appropriate levels.  Maybe you run them twice.  But now you hit cap and want to progress and you go back to those same dungeons on expert mode.

The problem lies first with the itemization which is largely lacking for many roles, and next in the fact that you mostly get upgrades through items bought with plaques.  Drop rate for epics in the expert dungeons (read:  meaningful upgrades) is not especially high which means that you mostly need to complete runs to gather enough plaques to buy gear.  On the surface, buying gear from plaques earned by killing bosses/finishing quests seems like a good idea.  You do X runs, you buy Y gear at a fixed rate. The problem is that they haven't settled on what a good rate is, yet.  Without belaboring the point, it's been changed a handful of times since release and at every change it gets slower. This seems bad.

It looks a lot like a dev team that's struggling to slow down turnover, but this isn't a great way to do it.  At some point you've seen all the dungeons and have been unlucky enough with drops that you look at the tiny number of plaques you have and the number of plaques you still need and come to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it anymore.  No one wants a grind and as cool as the instances are the first handful of times, if you go through the same ones for weeks on end, they lose their luster very quickly.  But what else is there to do?

Rift: The Good

Most of you probably know that I've been playing Rift since beta.  Since my time is most likely drawing to a close there, I thought I'd give it the usual treatment.  It is the kind of MMO that I tend to like:  deep, complex, and the kind of game where player skill is important and immediately apparent.  There's a lot to like which I'll sum up here in the usual no-particular-order.

Well Realized World
The world as a whole is consistent both in art and in storytelling for the most part.  The settings are all fairly distinct though perhaps not as memorable as, say, Snake Gulch, but really.  Each zone has its own theme and a story line of varying quality weaving through the quest chains that more people would enjoy if they could be bothered to read.  The instances are also themed and woven fairly interestingly in with the plot of the rest of the world.  The end result is quite good if you're into that kind of thing which I realize most people aren't.

The Ascended Class System
The mile high view of the class system goes a little something like this:  you pick one of four classes and then three of a bunch of souls which determines what your character can do.  Each soul is themed (offense, defense, heals, utility, etc.) and tailored per class.  You get your typical one or two points per level and actively spend them to get the improvements you want but those points count two ways.  First, you get the thing you're directly improving (reduce cast times, increase crit chances, get a new spell, etc).  Second, you get points toward that tree which opens up a set of fixed powers (the "root" powers).  So you can spend 10 points however you like within the framework and get the same root powers that everyone spending point in that soul gets.  The upshot is that finding the best builds is a little trickier but that you're never really left with an unplayable build.

Putting builds together in interesting ways is the crux of this system.  You can build offense powerhouses, rock-hard defensive masters, and jacks of all trades with a little effort.  Mages and rogues can heal, clerics and rogues can tank, and warriors can be masterful damage dealers.  But it's better than that, even.  You can have up to four roles which you can use to house completely different builds.  My main character is a cleric and I mainly tanked, but I can also DPS or heal with a pretty simple change of a role.  If you like the meta game of creating effective builds, then you'll love Rift.  Unfortunately, this also causes some issues which we'll discuss in the next installment.

Cutting Edge UI
As a former UI programmer, I know all too well that UI tends to fall into the bin labeled "under the radar unless it's crap" which usually means that if you get feedback for it at all, it's usually negative.  Rift bucks this trend by doing exactly what WoW did:  it took the best parts of contemporary games and added some bits that make it even better.  There's a button that sells all the vendor trash from your inventory.  There's a search for your backpack in case you can't find what you're looking for.  There's a clickable icon in your on-screen quest tracker for items you need to use to advance a quest.  It's not any one thing, but myriad small things tacked onto a UI that's both different and familiar that makes it great.  It just plain makes the game better and I like that.


Many people criticize the UI as being "too WoW-like".  Are they mad?  Why wouldn't you steal the streamlined and polished UI from the industry leader from which some very large percentage of your user base comes from?  I'm sorry, it's like a candy bar being too chocolatey--it just doesn't make sense!  Conventions, whether we like where they came from or not, are just that.  You expect them to be there and in the way you remember; changing them for spite's sake is not conducive to usability.

Invasion Events
One of Rift's better additions is that occasionally, based on population, rifts will open up periodically in the game world.  These can have varied encounter mechanics usually culminating in a boss all defeatable in about ten minutes.  If not closed, these rifts will periodically spawn an invasion squad that tromps through the world attacking players and NPCs it encounters on the way.  If the population is high enough in an area, the game will start a major invasion in which piles of rifts will open up spawning yet more piles of invasion squads that usually takes over quest hubs and the like.  Lose too many quest hubs and the invasion "succeeds" and the boss won't spawn typically leaving quest hubs in an unusable but reversible state.  With a little bit of strategery, however, players can defend key points, drive back the invaders, and spawn a raid boss that tromps through the world wreaking havoc.  Downing any of the invaders yields currencies that can be used to buy interesting gear and downing one of the raid bosses can be very lucrative.

You would think that having your quest hubs worked over by mobs would suck and it indeed can be unfortunate to log into the middle of a giant invasion.  In practice however, it's quite fun and you can lose hours just flowing from rift to rift.  Being OCD about playing these kinds of games, I leveled quickly and I was very saddened to not see an invasion once I'd passed the middle of the leveling curve.

Interesting Encounters
Back in the bad old days you had a tank, plopped them in front of a mob, stuck a healer behind with the "1" key weighted down and went to town.  Sure, you needed a team of oxen to move the tank into place and  you had to be mindful to punch at least one breathing hole into his helmet, but it was nonetheless pretty good.  Then someone got the bright idea that what these encounters really needed was more dancing.  It isn't difficult at all to imagine a malicious encounter designer belting off a proper evil laugh from the depths of a hollowed out volcano in expectation of thousands of players being manipulated as if by invisible designery strings.

Most of the encounter dances in Rift are of the form "don't stand in the fire" or "don't do X when Y is announced".  Since most of this comes through clearly in the presentation often with AV accompaniment from the UI, the cues are fairly hard to miss.  Then penalties for not doing the right thing in these events is usually pretty harsh and is sometimes "death" in a "do not pass go" kind of way.  A lot of people dislike this, but I think it's fantastic.  It means that you must be at least this competent to progress and it starts out in the very first instances.  Player skill matters and in a game that you expect people to play a lot of, you need that kind of  thing.

So it's all Good, Then?
Well...no.  We'll discuss some of what they got wrong (and got really, really wrong) in the next installments.

2010 in Review

In following last year's Award Winning post, this is 2010 in review.  Probably the biggest change this year was officially getting back into Lego after something like 20 years of not doing much with it.  This culminated in a trip to Brick Fair at which I won an award.  The Lego action was, naturally, punctuated by a number of excellent beers and heavy drinking.

Massachusetts Can Bite Me
I wasn't really a fan of Virginia and I really hated Maryland, but Massachusetts is giving Maryland a real good run for its money.  This place is way too goddamned expensive, and everyone here seems to be woefully self-absorbed.  Given that my place of employ has moved much closer to Boston proper, I now have to take a much busier route to go to/from work and I'm convinced that my chances of dying in a traffic crash are now several hundred times higher.  Note:  they were not low before.  People here really can't drive for shit; must be an east coast thing.

Probably the only redeeming factor of where I live is having three Lego stores within driving distance--assuming I don't die on the way there or back, mind you.

Fun With Lego
One of the side effects of not crunching like crazy is that I've had a lot more time to pursue different hobbies, the most time consuming of those (so far) is building with Lego again.  If you haven't seen my flickr stream, you should go go there right now.  It's OK, I'll wait.  Unbeknownst to me (though I really should have figured) there's a huge online Lego builder community and I've been able to pick up a lot of fun techniques from them.  It all came to a frothy head at Brick Fair in August.  It was very cool and not just because I won a trophy.  I'm hoping I can get back there next year and am in the very early stages of building a presentable piece.  Wish me luck!

Gaming
Other than Lego (and drinking) I played a lot of games, some of which were very good.  Most notably, I finally broke down and bought an Xbox360.  This is largely because my PS3 was bricked by one of Sony's firmware flashes which killed the Blu-ray drive.  I got the PS3 as a gift so I suppose I shouldn't be so pissy about the $150 they want to replace the drive, but it's the principle of the thing.  Anyway...

Torchlight:  ***
Recommended by a bunch of people so I picked it up.  It's a very pretty Diablo-like hack&slash kind of game that looks a lot like World of Warcraft.  This isn't a coincidence since it's a lot of the same developers.  I sort of view it as a distraction--pretty with nice explosions but lacking any real depth.

Serious Sam HD:  The First Encounter:  ***

Serious Sam is usually my first rebuttal when people say "you can't just make a doom-like shooter anymore" which has been en vogue since Half Life first came out which I guess makes it old-skool.  This is the same as the original game only polished up for the current generation.  As it turns out, the intervening eight years have encompassed a lot of technologies!  It's pretty much the same game as I remembered only I'm a lot older and slower.  My aim isn't what it was and even then it wasn't all that.  I'd probably rate it higher if I had retained more of my FPS skills but I found it to be very frustrating in places.  

Mass Effect 2:  *****
Bioware seems to have fixed most of the major issues (stupid inventory system, maddening difficulty curve, etc.) but seem to have left some of the awesome on the cutting room floor.  I was hoping to get through the game again now that I've picked up all the DLCs but dumping half a diet coke into the gaming rig kind of puts the skids on that.  The short:  some things streamlined very well, some things streamlined too much, and some pretty awful plot points.  You can read all about it on them thare intarwebs so I won't rehash, though I'm hoping that ME3 strikes a happier balance.

Knights of the Old Republic:  *****
OK, so Mass Effect is pretty awesome but it's the first of the Bioware games I'd played.  Let's fix that!  KoTOR was the next one and holy crap, I'm sad I missed this when it first came out.  The graphics haven't aged well but the story holds up exceptionally.  It's got some very memorable characters (HK-47, Mission Vao, Bastilla Shan) and probably the best plot twist in all of gaming.  Definitely one of the best RPGs I've played.

Knights of the Old Republic 2:  ***, **** w/mods
I mean, why not?  Unbeknownst to me, Obsidian has quite the reputation for starting big but ending flat on their projects which is probably why I had such a hard time finding a copy.  The beginning of the game is exceptional from the twisting plotlines to the character development.  The ending of the game is a travesty where most of the interesting bits are dropped on the floor and the opportunity lost.  Luckily, the fan community has come to the rescue with a number of mods that make the game seem a little more complete.  I have to wonder how awesome the game would have been if it had been released in a more completed state.

Bioshock:  ***
I'm late to the party as usual.  It's a pretty good shooter with some interesting plot points, but overall I wasn't all that thrilled with it.  There really needed to be more reason to use the other plasmids and I never had enough ammo.  It was very pretty but it was also frustratingly dark a lot of the time.  I'll probably grab the sequel at some point, but I'm not in any huge hurry.  Interesting fourth wall busting.

Supreme Commander 2:  ***
As much of a Supreme Commander fanboi as I might be, Supreme Commander 2 really didn't do it for me.  It  really lacked the depth of the first and the single player campaign had a very brittle twist.  I played the campaign through, did a couple skirmishes, and really didn't give it more thought than that.  Very sad-making

Vanguard:  *****
Very few people played Vanguard at release.  I caught it about six months in and it was already on its way out.  This summer, my MMO "friends" decided to pick it back up again and I have to say that it's still all that and a bag of chips.  On good hardware most of the perf bugs are gone and the game has been somewhat streamlined from the bad old days but it still has most of the depth it had the last time I played.  Alas, it isn't really a solo game and since my "friends" stranded me there...again....it didn't make sense to keep the sub up. Vanguard is really the last of a dying breed:  the involved MMO--the kind I really like.  It's sad that there aren't more like it being made and even more sad that I can't find reliable people to play with.  Vanguard remains the only MMO that I really want to play more of but can't.  It remains one of the best MMOs that no one plays.

Minecraft:  *****

If you've escaped the torrential flood of Minecraft on the intartoobs, you must be living under a rock or something.  It's a spiffy little game that is terribly addictive hitting all the magic buttons of "exploration", "building", and "abject terror".  The exploration bit is well played by a very organic terrain/cave generation system.  Even in its unapologetic blockyness the generated landscapes can be very beautiful.  Just about everything in the world is rearrangeable and people have built some very nifty structures.  The part of "abject terror" is played by monsters sneaking up behind you and then hearing "....sssssssssss***BOOOM****" as it explodes stranding your nifty diamond equipment a billion miles away, doomed to decay before you can get back to collect it.  Pretty amazing game, all things said, and it well deserves all the publicity it's getting.

Civ V:  ****
Terribly broken in a lot of ways, but still the same old Civ in others.  I'm a little more forgiving than many due to having gotten an unexpected credit on it (I did work on it, just not for very long).  I think the game is less strategically interesting than, say, Civ IV, but the tactical combat is a lot more interesting.  I played a bunch of it, found the One True Path To Victory, and then promptly lost interest.  I'm a little disappointed that it could bring my beefy gaming box (RIP) to its knees.

Halo:  Reach:  ***
This is actually what made me buy a 360, finally.  I am an unabashed fan of the original Halo on the original Xbox.  I played the crap out of it.  Halo 2 was kind of a letdown--on top of being very short, it seemed to leave the story in a really crappy place.  In the intervening, what, five years there's been a lot of Halo on systems I didn't have, so when the reviews of Reach started rolling in saying that it was a spiritual successor to the original, I had to pick it up.  The good: pretty much just like the original Halo in regards to gameplay.  The bad:  pretty much just like the original Halo in regards to gameplay.  The weapons feel "right" which is nice, but it has the typical trope of going through an area one direction and then back through the same area in the other direction at a later point.  It also suffered from Halo's typical "there's way more going on than I get during the game" which kind of sucks.  There's soooo much backstory that it's sad that they don't deem to show us more of it.  Also, as a particular bad point, none of the other spartans on your team seem all that interesting--sort of cardboard cutouts that die one at a time to mark your progression through the game.  Enjoyable, if dated, but it really left me wanting more.

Halo:  ODST:  ****
After Reach, I didn't really have high hopes for ODST which is probably why I liked it so much.  It was short, like Reach, but had much better storytelling.  The game is mostly character based with you picking up the roles of various people in your squad and it was fun to see part of how it tied into the events of Halo 3.  I thought it was, anyway, until I played Halo 3 and saw how tangential it all was.  So I suppose I like the tie-ins that I made up in my head rather than the ones that were actually in the game.  Still, a very enjoyable playthrough, if a bit short.

Halo 3:  ****
I really did play them in this order.  It turned out to be pretty difficult to get Halo 3 which I didn't expect.   I don't know if it's because I've been playing so many Bioware games or what, but I thought that the storytelling kind of fell flat in Halo 3.   A lot of it seemed very sudden and most of the big events were all too predictable. I'm also kind of let down by the ending.

Red Faction:  Guerilla:  ****
This one is sort of a love/hate thing for me.  On the one hand, this is the guy that bricked my PS3.  On the other hand, having been lent it for the X360 and actually been able to play it, it's a really fun game.  I don't know why it flew so low on the radar because it has a lot of really awesome things:  fun driving, fun shooting, and being able to destroy just about anything in the world.  Building in the way?  No problem!  In fact, the hardest part is deciding whether you want to run your vehicle through it, kill it with explosive charges, or (my personal favorite) go to town on it with your trusty sledge.  Decisions, decisions!

So there you have it, 2010 in review.  

So As It Turns Out...

...only the video card was dead.  In retrospect, I should have tested that first, but I'm super surprised that nothing else was dead.

This is Why I Hate Putting Gear on the Floor

The scene:  my "living" room near the computer desk.  The setup:  half a bottle of warm diet coke sitting perilously on the computer desk and a very expensive very fast machine on the floor below.  The action:  bobble the half filled bottle of warm diet coke which, while capped, falls and spews all over the machine.  The aftermath:  one very dead machine.

So now four hours later I've got my data back off of it and the 500GB drive installed in the old machine and lots of stuff backed up.  Nothin' like a tragedy to kick the backup reflex into high gear.  

$%&*!%&*!!!

Could have been worse, I suppose.  The most expensive part (the solid state drive) is still OK but at the very least, it looks like the motherboard and video card are toasted.  The other bad thing is that the CPU and the power supply may also be toasted but it's harder for me to test those.  Soooooo....it looks like I'm spending more money at newegg.  My hope is that I can get bits and pieces fast enough to get the thing working by the holiday, but I suppose that hinges entirely on how many bits and pieces are broken.  

Bleh.  

Friendly Note to New England Drivers...

...if you're following close enough that I could be mistaken for towing you, you may be too close.

That is all.

And Now, a Rant From Our Sponsors

I'd say that few things get me into a ranting mood but that'd be a bald-faced lie.  Instead, I'll pick one thing that sent me into a frothy rage last week and go from there.

If you aren't familiar with The Escapist, it's generally a pretty good gaming-oriented site with a bunch of usually-reasonably-well-thought-out articles and home to the terribly amusing Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame.  (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if half their traffic is directly attributable to ZP.)  So last week while waiting for a (terribly long) compile I pop over there to see what's what, and I find this:  Open Letter to People Who Make Games as penned by Russ Pitts.  It's not a long read, but if you, like me, have ever spent time in the Biz, you'll get good and frothy too.  Feel free to read it if you like (I'll wait), but I'll sum it up:  the game industry is doomed because game people suck.  One particular quote really sent me off the deep end:

 I know that some of you take this seriously enough to devote your working hours making these games right, making patches and fixes that will resolve your players' issues. I know that some of you work overtime on this. I know you lose money. I know it sucks for you. And yet, I don't care. 

This is indicative of the kind of entitlement that the general public has that is particularly maddening.  If you've heard about the jackasses who did a DOS attack on Minecraft because they weren't happy with Notch's speed of updates then you know exactly what I'm talking about.  I could probably link a bunch of other similar things but I won't bore you with that.  Instead, I'll bore you with a bunch of my observations across five companies and more than a decade of professional game development.

Let's start here:  No one in the Biz wants to ship a shitty game.  I don't care about your hypotheticals about evil execs and pernicious designers, none of the untold hundreds of people I've worked with personally have ever set out to build a game that sucks all ass, ever.  It's just not part of the culture which is why I have no issue making such a blanket statement.  Most games are released before they're ready which is part of what Russ's rant is about but that's largely decided by execs and money guys; you know, the stuffed suits that make the real money.

Why is that?  Well, because it's a business.  That business would be making as much money for investors as possible and that means shipping the most things with the most appeal at the most opportune times.  Hardcore gamers just looooove to whine about how everything is getting dumbed down.  This isn't a coincidence.  The economics of the thing is that if you need a budget of $30M (small to middling these days; giant when I started in the Biz) you have to sell about a bajillion copies to break even.  Sorry.  That's just the way it is if you want your spiffy art at a decent framerate.   So the industry as a whole tries to open up any given game to the widest audience possible even if it means knocking off all the gnarly corners that us old-timers really loved.  Usually this is stuff like "approachability" and "accessibility" and probably a bunch of other "ibilities" that escape me at the moment.

The "opportune times" bit also comes with baggage.  Everyone who's ever worked on software knows that software projects pretty much always run long; sometimes way long if they even ship at all.  This is super bad when you start talking about fixed schedules like we almost always have, i.e., we mostly ship around the holidays.  How fixed these schedules may actually be tends to never be as fixed as management would make them seem to be which is part of why at most companies people crunch like fucking corn flakes most of the year.  The best part?  A lot of the time your reward for being a hero is getting laid off at the end of the project!

Software people outside the Biz understand a lot of this.  No plan is ever as complete as the Suits would like and no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy schedule.  In the greater software world this is generally understood which is why stuff like Agile is such a big deal.  If you can't adjust the ship date, then you'd better be able to adjust one or both of { budget | feature set } otherwise, well, in the immortal words of one Adam Savage:  "Failure is always an option".

In the Biz, teams which can actually affect quality directly almost never have control over any corner.  Our ship date is fixed and most times pushed inward due to certification checks and manufacturing, our feature set is largely fixed because it's part of what the Suits want to market (not that they wouldn't change their minds midway through a project and mandate said changes without adjusting schedules or budgets or anything), and as a kicker, the same Suits who fix the ship date also fix the budget.  Each of these things from a business point of view is sensical but it means that there's never enough of anything on a given project and you're usually short two if not all of the three.

Software is a pretty young art (almost certainly not a science despite what my two fancy, expensive pieces of paper say) and the greater industry is still wrestling with its care and nurture.  The Games Biz is even younger and seems to be so heads-down that we can't even effectively learn from the larger body of experience that the software biz has.   Why is this?  Our management tends to be inexperienced.  I've had maybe two or three managers that didn't outright suck over a couple dozen of them and I don't think I've ever met a reasonable exec.  Real Managers (TM) don't often show up in game dev because pay is so comparatively low and hours are so comparatively crappy.  Managers, unlike artists, designers, or programmers, don't grow up wanting to make games--at least, I haven't met any good ones that have at this point in time.

And wouldn't that be just like a disgruntled worker-cog to pin the blame solely on management?  Probably, but our worker-cogs tend to be inexperienced too.  We turn over something like 20% of our workforce every year.  Other than college sports rosters, I don't know of any group that does that and remains competitive.  (Maybe we're only competitive because most of our peers are doing it too.)  Most people burn out after a few years.  It turns out that crappy working environments + long hours + looming layoffs + lower than average pay is way greater than the idealism that drives most people to get into the Biz in the first place.  But, as it turns out, this is kind of what drives a lot of studios because for every one of us that falls there are ten bright eyed kids that would do the job for free.  Never mind the fact that only a few of these kids will statistically stick around for more than a few years or that exceptionally few of them are actually qualified to do what you need them to do.  I've been on more than a few teams that bulked up during the painful phases of a project with a bunch of junior people who made the entire thing generally much harder.  It's almost as if we should know better by now.  This is part of why studios go through the hire/fire/re-hire cycles and part of why salaries are so comparatively low.

So, OK, Mr. Pitts:

When I play a game that you have made, and which is broken, I ask myself the question: Which is it with you? Did you not know that your game had problems, or did you know and decide to ship it anyway? I hope you can understand that either way we have a problem. Actually, the problem is mostly yours. 

I'm really not sure who he thinks his audience is.  I sure as hell don't decide when the thing goes out.  I don't think I've shipped a title that I didn't wish I had more time to fix.  Maybe Suits read this stuff.  Either way, most games don't ship in as broken a state as he seems to imply.  All software has bugs.  I dislike buggy games as much as the next guy (actually, probably way more than the next guy) but to reiterate:  no one wants to ship a shitty game.  Want to send a real message, one that will be way more meaningful than a snarky plea?  Stop buying games you think are broken.  Bonus points if you don't give a broken game a buy recommendation.  Tell the Suits that this just isn't good enough and maybe they'll start getting us worker-cogs enough resources to build better games.  Seems pretty simple, right?

You will be the one who has made a game that is so bad I can't actually play it. You will have failed at your only job, tomake a game. Worse, you will have contributed to the depression of your industry. You may be putting yourself and people you know out of a job. 

News flash for you, buddy:  I'm probably out of a job either way.  Ship a million copies or miss a ship date, it doesn't really matter.  The economics just plain don't scale and most companies just plain don't care about the people they employ either way.  The typical work agreement is that they can fire me at any time without cause!  That's right, kids, you're just a cog and they don't even need a reason to kick your ass out the door.  That's just part of the cost of following The Dream.  Apparently another part of it is suffering fools who really ought to know better.

BrickFair 2010

As you might have surmised from my last post, I attended BrickFair 2010 in Chantilly, VA. I was originally just going to visit on one of the public days and hang with some old co-workers, but ended up staying for a number of days and showing some pieces instead. On the right is a very fuzzy picture of the five MOCs I brought. It amuses (and dismays) me that just about every third party picture of my stuff I've seen is far and away better than any picture I've ever taken of them. There may be a new camera in my future.


The Normandy was nominated for two categories and won "Best Sci-Fi" against some very good builds. A very fuzzy picture of the trophy is on the right (also in the center of the above).  I certainly didn't expect to win anything but I'm super happy that I did. It sort of legitimizes the last five months of frantic buying/building--not that I need any legitimizing, mind you.

It was good times. I met a lot of cool people who I only previously knew from their work and online names.  I was very impressed by all the sweet builds many of which were way cooler in person than in photos.  It's a good show and run by a bunch of awesome people.  With any luck, I'll be back next year.

A Funny Thing Happened At BrickFair Today...

So picture this. I'm showing off the Normandy in an almost incessant crush of people when I hear a familiar voice...

Flashback to 2003 and I'm leaving my first job. I'm interviewing with the man who would later hire me. It's the dead of winter in a freak Virginia snowstorm. He's wearing a Hawaiian shirt and is walking around in sandals. "Is it cold enough for you?", was his first question.

Sure enough, it's my old boss standing there with his family who I've never met. I worked for him for two years before parting ways and he had no idea who I was. I told him my name (twice) and it still didn't dawn on him. I told him I worked form him at XXXX company and the lightbulb finally went off.

Filed under "I'm glad I didn't need a reference".