It could be...

Not only is it Chevy truck month, but it's also Ram truck month!  It's a twofer!

I don't think they're trying anymore

"Fall Truck Month Season"?  Really?  Thanks for that, Ram.

edit>  that joke is funnier if I use the right words.  WurdsRHrd.

Truck Month?

Why yes, yes it is.  Ford truck month, as it turns out.  Thanks, football season!

I might have missed the last few months' "science" because I wasn't watching TV.  You might be able to figure out why.

Up too late again but not for the last time

I wanted to throw down some poorly-chosen words about WildStar since it starts in like an hour and the weight of months spent at its controls has not yet crushed my fanboi-ish love of it (don't worry, it will).  No, I am not staying up to play it at crack of 2am launch.  It may be because I'm still getting over a cold and not drunk--this time! 

Even if they didn't already have my money and I wasn't already looking forward to its insanely styled art, huge depth, and literally laugh out loud writing, I desperately want them to succeed.  It is rare in this day and age of 0.99$ throwaway apps and hugely-mcgrindy F2P timewasters to see anything with real complexity and legitimate challenge.  These are the kinds of games I like and I'm sure I've ranted about them here before.

I want to see WildStar succeed because those are the kinds of games I want to work on--ones that ooze style and can be fun and frustrating and funny and dark and serious all at the same time.  These are the kinds of games that I think the industry desperately needs:  ones that you can't throw together in a couple weeks and shovel out the door, ones that bring people (real people!) together, that you can spend real time with and later bore other people with your stories from.  Most of all I want to see WildStar succeed because these are the kinds of games that I like and there aren't nearly enough of them.

If that's all too sappy for you, I blame large doses of cold medicine...or sobriety.  Your regularly scheduled truck month posts will resume shortly.

Is it?

It's "Ram commercial truck season".  I think that's close enough :P

This is *WAY* too easy...

It's way too easy to make binge buys on Amazon.  I sometimes justify this partially because I pay for Prime...which means I'll have the stuff I ordered just now by Friday.  WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE!

It's that time again...

It took two weeks, but guess what--it's truck month!  This time it's Chevy truck month as detailed by a local dealership ad (Frisco, if you care) as delivered by Pandora.

On the one hand, I like Pandora (and who exactly was responsible for telling me about it, anyway?!?!).  On the other hand, I hate ads but not enough (yet) to pay them money.

WTF is up with truck month?

Apparently it's "Ford Truck Month".  Or, at least, that's what they keep telling me incessantly on TV.  I'm pretty sure that there was also a "Truck Month" last football season.  So that got me thinking:  how many months are actually a "Truck Month"?  Watch this space!

Line Art

Not too terribly long ago, I bought a Surface Pro 2.  Forget, for the moment, all your criticisms of Microsoft, its recent turmoil, and the travesty that is its latest Windows.  This machine is the culmination of the crossroads of everything I've ever wanted in a computer.  It's fast, it's hugely portable, it has good battery life, but critically, and most importantly, it has a built in pressure sensitive tablet.

As a lefty who mouses with my right hand, I haven't ever and never will art well with one.  I have owned many, many tablets over the last twenty years from extravagantly expensive to terrifically cheap and terrible.  Despite having used these to good effect and having practiced on them for untold thousands of hours it's never been as natural as pencil on paper.  Working digitally, for me anyway, has always been cleaner but it's never been as natural as meatspace efforts.  The Surface Pro 2 solves this neatly and it's no word of a lie that I've been waiting for decades for a proper solution--and now I have it.

This is Rhode from Divinity II which I'll write about more at a later date, most likely in my end of year recap.  Rhode was one of my favorite characters.  Sketched from reference on my Bamboo then cleaned up on the Surface with colors hopefully following at some point.

Yes, I could have purchased  Cintiq but they are hugely expensive especially for someone who doesn't honestly art all that much =and= the Surface came with all the laptop I'll need for hopefully quite a while.  Now, other than time, I don't really have any excuses.

As I was thinking of replacing my old laptop anyway, this really was a no-brainer.  Actually since my employer paid for most of it through a development bonus it was even-less-than-no-brainer.  I am enormously happy with it which I haven't been able to say about a laptop for a long, long time.

2013 In Review

The next installment in the infrequent "20XX In Review" "series" takes us through 2013. There wasn't much in the way of a work crunch last year (sadly, not the norm) so, naturally I spent more than half the year being unhappy with GW2 as you've probably already read.  BrickFiesta went pretty well with an SR2 that got some good press.  Last year also marks the return of my home brewing efforts now with all-grain goodness after a many year hiatus.  Mixed results so far but looking hopeful.  The only other notable non-gaming thing I can, er, note is that I purchased a smoker and am now churning out smokey BBQ roughly every two weeks.  Best $350 I ever spent.  If you have space, time, $350, and a love of slow smoked meats, you have to have to have to get a smoker.  On to gaming.

Guild Wars 2 Endgame (2012):  **
Given that I spent roughly half the year playing, I can't not put an entry here.  I'll stick to my previous comment that it's probably the best game I've played in a long, long while, but as with most MMOs, the more time you spend with it the more you notice the odd bits and shortcomings.  As a PvPer I have to say that the game is pretty rough as I've already documented and there is no reasonable PvE endgame.  Instead we get periodic Living Story releases which are interesting but can't hide the fact that there isn't really a lot of depth there.

Duke Nukem Forever (2011): *
Naturally I followed GW2, the best game I've played in a while, with the worst game I've played in a while.  DNF was awful in all the ways that the gaming press thrashed it for.  It's a game from another time in a very inapt Austin Powers-like way and despite the fancy window dressing ends up feeling dated in just about every way that counts.  There are some high points but IMO it wasn't worth slogging through the low points to find them.  The best thing I can say about it is that it was mercifully short.  If you're a hardcore Duke fan, you probably already have this.  If you're not, don't bother unless you like a good train wreck.

Serious Sam 3 (2011):  ****
As has been well documented, I am a sucker for the super Serious Sam series.  It's about as pure an oldskool shooter as you'll find and SS3 BFE takes it to the current generation.  The design is just about the same as the previous two with steadily increasing hordes of bads to carve up in steadily increasingly overkill ways culminating in an end boss that I just plain can't beat.  That barely dents my enthusiasm for the series, however.  Anyone interested in player progression and encounter design should take a run through any of the Serious Sam series.  Seriously.

Rogue Legacy (2013):  ***
This is a pretty interesting platformer with a couple interesting hooks.  First, it's rogue-like at its core which basically boils down to ridiculously difficult with random levels and a semblance of perma-death.  Second, it's generational (hence the Legacy part of the name) with the player taking the role of an increasingly long lineage of career adventurers.  Each new generation comes with its choice of a few of the available classes and their own set of interesting ads/disads.  Examples of such include "Congenital Insensitivity to Pain" which removes the health bar, and "no foot pulse" which prevents floor traps from springing.  These run the gamut from ridiculous like "Vertigo" which flips the screen upside down rendering it nearly unplayable to hilarious like "Dyslexia" which scrambles some of the dialog and rearranges some miscellaneous stuff.  I want terribly to like this game more because it oozes so much style but I don't have the skill or patience for it.

Portal 2 (2011):  ****
I finally got around to this one and it didn't disappoint.  It, like its predecessor, has some fun puzzles and doesn't outlast its welcome.  Also much like the first, its strength lies in its writing and often very dark humor. As I've ranted before, humor of all sorts, dark or otherwise, I find lacking in most games of this generation.

Divinity:  Dragon Commander (2013):  *****

Good name for a Fangbear, really.

Luckily, the folks at Larian Studios (in Belgium no less--home of some of my favorite beers) have seen fit to try to fill the gap.  D:DC is easy to overview as a Risk-like strategic game bolted to a very primitive RTS with Mass Effect-like dialogs between but that doesn't really do it justice.  The dialogs involve some very memorable characters including your cabinet with representatives of each race (Undead, Elf, Dwarf, Lizard, and Imp), your wizard confidant Maxos, one of the four available princesses, and a handful of generals and other support staff each with their own unique if exaggerated view of the world and their own agendas.  Your decisions affect the strategic map and the delicate balance of approval you'll need with each race to unite the realm.  Units on the strategic map are your starting units in each RTS combat or you can auto-resolve with the help of your generals who grow throughout each campaign.  Lots of otherwise innocent words sacrificed there, and this still does not do the game justice.  The writing is some of the best I've seen in any game and even though each character starts out as a caricature of an extreme viewpoint, they all have their endearing points and all seem very human.  This is complimented by a quirky sense of humor and some of the best voice acting in any game.  I have no idea if the folks at Larian are native English speakers but they deserve a medal for this gem either way--it is clearly a game that is more than the sum of its parts.

Divine Divinity (2002):  ****
When I find a gem of a game that I've missed from a studio I don't know, I typically want to see what else I've missed and Divine Divinity did not disappoint. It's an old-skool western RPG in the Diablo sense and despite the period-awful voice acting and not-well-aged graphics, it ends up being pretty entertaining nonetheless.  It's an excellent showing as one of Larian's first games and despite its somewhat troperrific plot it's still recommendable for anyone who can handle its dated-ness.

Beyond Divinity (2004):  ***
The follow up to Divine Divinity wasn't nearly as awesome as the original.  It's way more complicated in not good ways and while it does have a fun twist, it's easy to lose it in the grindy-ness.  I was most surprised that there wasn't really any epic loot (all the unique equipment was pedestrian) and there were way too many skills and way too few skill points to spend on them.  The tedium of its puzzles and mazes was mostly forgiven by the ending which tied it in very well to its predecessor--even if the last few encounters were ridiculously difficult.  Hopefully Divinity II will show improvement.

In Review...
So that was 2013 as a whirlwind--some good, some bad, and some fantastic gaming in between.

Guild Wars 2: The Ugly

The fun and games are over and herein I'm going to rant mostly about WvW. I assume that anyone working through this mammoth of a post is at least passingly familiar with WvW and GW2 in general so I'll dispense with explaining things to keep the WALL OF TEXT CRIT nearer to non-fatal.  Suffice to say that I played a lot of this game most of which was spent in the less-than-perfect parts of it.

Power in Numbers
All other things equal, the team fielding the most players has the biggest advantage--this is why most professional sports teams field exactly the same number.  Because there's so much emphasis on DPS there ends up being not a lot of time to react and even a very tanky character has difficulty dealing with two bursty opponents simultaneously.  Add this to a relative lack of meaningful ability depth and you lose for the most part any competitive 1 vs X "skill overcomes numbers" play.  This isn't entirely true but the exceptions are where the 1 is incredibly more skilled than the X and the X can barely mash the keys with a target.  There is just plain too much DPS to deal with for any prolonged period of time in such an encounter and it doesn't take any real skill to do it.

The downed state causes other issues.  If there were such a thing as a typical group vs. group fight it would not be uncommon for one or more players to be downed and revived.  For a cohesive and well-coordinated group, it is exceedingly rare for the opposing group to get a stomp off especially since most classes have some sort of delaying tactic for would-be stompers.  In small group encounters this is already bad enough but you look past that and pretend that it encourages group coordination.  In larger encounters, especially those where one side outnumbers the other, it typically renders the larger team un-killable.  If the size disparity is large enough, even dead-dead team members can be resurrected faster than they can be killed.

Yet another advantage is run speed.  A few professions have perma-swiftness, a paltry 33% movement bonus out of combat (also:  no mounts) but many do not.  Luckily a few professions can boost multiple people in a group periodically and since swiftness stacks, a large group can often get perma-swiftness before they even set off.  So in a weird backward way, larger groups now move faster than smaller ones.  This is a notable penalty in WvW where objectives aren't super far apart and smaller groups can't flip objectives anywhere near as fast as larger ones.

The speed differential becomes even more important when you consider how relatively hemmed in the maps are.  They aren't especially large to begin with and with runspeed they're effectively 33% smaller, but they're also heavily channeled toward a very small number of chokepoints.  This means that travel through the map tends to be along fairly well-defined routes.  Fights then also tend to be along those well-defined routes which in turn means that you had better finish up fast before more folks come by to tip the tides.  If enemies show, you're doubly screwed because even if you turn tail and run, you're probably still locked in combat so even if you've got swiftness you can't get away because your new opponents aren't in combat and can move at full speed.  Zergs can almost always catch runners.  Sorry.

Larger groups also carry more supply so while your 5 person group typically carries not quite enough to build two rams, a 10 person group carries enough for three.  Multiple groups also trivialize the lord NPC part of the capture and note that the capture point flips faster with more people in it.  Large enough groups can flip a tower before the swords show up on the map and within seconds of the map indicator for keeps.  And before you say that there should be scouts there:  a) scouting is completely unrewarded in GW2 so almost no one does so, and b) even one person per tower/keep is typically more than low tier servers can afford even if there were people to call in--10 is a zerg in T8 NA and typically two borderland maps are empty.

The last advantage we'll discuss is one of the worst--the AoE cap.  For performance reasons, player abilities are capped at 5 targets (most siege enjoys a much higher cap of 50).  So in a 5 vs. 5 encounter, every player from both teams can potentially hit every other member from the other team.  In a 10 vs. 5 team, each of the larger team can hit every member of the smaller team with their AoEs but the smaller team can only effectively hit half of the larger team.  This is even worse in actuality than it sounds since you aren't guaranteed that your attacks will hit the same half so in all likelihood your damage is spread out amongst the larger group meaning that your chances of even downing a target are now much slimmer.

The worst part about the AoE cap is what it does to player behavior.  Since there's no real disadvantage to standing on the same spot, larger groups will typically stack to gain virtual immunity to AoE damage.  The larger the group, the higher the virtual immunity--call it "zerg immunity" if you like.  Now note that the vast majority of the attacks in GW2 are AoE.  The game is almost completely devoid of penalties to standing on top of one another and with all the benefits it's no real wonder why the game is played this way.

Biggest Rewards for the Least Risk
GW2 has some interesting design philosophies, many of which are good.  One of these is that no one should ever be sad that a friendly has shown up.  This leads to all kinds of fun things like never having to rush to a resource node before someone ninjas it, all XP being awarded in its entirety amongst contributors, and generally making group play very convenient.  In PvP modes this has many adverse consequences.

WvW's rewards are largely all personal and include XP, coin, karma, and WXP, the WvW version of normal XP.  At max reward minus any bonuses it takes 83.33 player kills to gain one level.  WvW levels tend to be worthless outside of titles in batches less than 10.  So you're looking at killing a veritable army of enemy players if this is your primary mode of play and want to progress.  WXP is also awarded for objectives on the map like any other world quest in the game.  These include any flip/capture that yields match points and to a much lesser degree, defending a land objective from enemy players. It is notable that these objectives on the whole deliver much more WXP than killing the average player who is most likely worth a very small number of points (double digits if you're lucky).

So, as a gamer wanting to progress as fast as possible to get some nice WvW level bonuses, how would you go about maximizing your WXP?  That's right, you'd go flip a bunch of objectives as quickly as possible.  Enemy defenders?  Go somewhere else!  There's usually tons of things to choose from and it's not like a heavily defended objective gives any more points--the defenders are probably going to take off before you can kill them regardless.  The faster you can zerg them down, colloquially known as "PvDooring", the more points you get.  Forget skilled play, forget balanced builds, just group up with as many of your close personal friends as you can and steamroll everything.  As an added bonus, the larger your zerg, the more likely you are to completely dominate your opponents which typically leaves them completely demoralized and less likely to show up tomorrow.  This is how much of WvW is played across most servers and it is scarily effective.

There are lots of valid reasons to break up a larger zerg to fight a thinking enemy and even more valid reasons why this never happens.  The long and the short of it, though, is that matchup scores are almost solely determined by population and coverage.  No amount of skill and organization can overcome these two aspects for any statistically significant variation.

Scoring and Matchmaking

WvW(vW) scoring and matchmaking is especially ridiculous.  It has not only changed a lot, but it often hasn't made any sense whatsoever and is occasionally very, very broken.  Look away to escape the madness!

In the early days, servers were all ranked based on who they'd beaten in the past using a modified Glicko system.  This meant that if your server blew out your opponents, you'd get a pile of points and might move up into the next tier.  It also meant that if you got totally curb-stomped you might lose enough points to drop down a tier.  This seems to be reasonable and good.  Minus any confounding effects or botched maths, you'd generally be matched up with servers in the same ballpark as your home server.  The problem is that there is a confounding effect, and it's a doozy.

Anyone at any time can transfer to any server they like so long as the server isn't full.  Your server of choice full?  Wait until like 4am when it's less likely to be and voila you're on a "winning" team.  Again I have to note that we should expect gamers of all people to choose the shortest path to the cheese and in fact, this is exactly what happens.  A huge number of WvW(vW)ers stack on the top three servers until drama shatters them at which point they bandwagon to the next new server.  This causes the Glicko system to go into open revolt because the formerly top rated server had to spend weeks plummeting down to its new rightful place (the "Glicko Ghetto" in many cases) now that the "hardcore" guilds had all left.  The new server upon gaining a giant influx of guilds now goes through the process of completely blowing out their opponents for weeks on end until they find competitive matches in the upper tiers.  The really tragic part of this is that most of the folks who don't transfer end up with the short end of the stick on both trips.  If you're a native, then you're being "propped up" by the newcomers who "know better" from "higher tiers" and once the bandwagoners leave you got curbstomped for weeks until the server finally settles likely worse for the wear.  I would say "this happened frequently during the first N months of the game" but in fact, it's still going on.

"OK!", says ArenaNet.  "We know how to fix this!", they said.  "We'll reset all ratings back to baseline, let each tier of servers fight it out for a week, then start the next set of tiers based on the outcome.  Eventually it'll all even out, right?"  Players in the know rightfully cried foul since all it meant was that the servers doing the most curbstomping would then be pushed to the top tiers and the most competitive of tiers (typically the top) would be pushed to the bottom because the scoring gaps are much smaller.  This also coincided with the end of free transfers meaning that it would be marginally less convenient to transfer to a "winning" server (now it costs in-game gold to convert to cashmoney gems or just spend $10 for the gems directly).  Many top tier servers tanked their matches only for ArenaNet to realize How Terrible an Idea This Was After All(TM) and not reset things.  I honestly don't know why this wasn't obvious.

Months pass and while the bandwagoning might have been slowed, it was only slowed slightly given that the cost wasn't really prohibitive and destination servers were often more than willing to subsidize the cost of moving entire guilds in the name of "more competitive matches".  Over the first year of the game it ended up polarizing the WvW populations toward higher tiers where things like player abilities stop working as the servers themselves start buckling under the load.  Luckily (?) on many of the top servers the WvW queues were so long that you were often spared the misery.

During this time people started to note that a lot of the matchups were the same from week to week.  While many of them were competitive, occasionally there were tiers where the Glicko maths didn't really work out.  One of the more egregious examples was T8 in North America where one large server was completely and utterly destroying the other two servers week after week but since the smaller servers didn't have a huge number of points to bleed, the larger server never moved up.  "Aha!", the ANet devs say.  "We can fix this too!"  Their solution was to make matchups pseudo-random.  The servers would roll some dice and mostly stay in the same tier but would occasionally bounce one or two tiers higher or one or two tiers lower.  So from the bottom of T8 you could be facing servers from T6 which would result in a complete blowout for you and very likely a boring week for them.  On the other side, a T1 server could be matched up in T3 against a T4 and T5 server and lose rating because they didn't blow them out badly enough.  Many players argued that this would be terrible for the player base and guess what?  They were right again!

While this may have fixed some of the bad maths around ANet's implementation of Glicko, it also meant that every week there was a good chance that your tier would have a lousy matchup. The only real way to ensure that your WvW wouldn't be curb-stomped was to (dun-Dun-DUN!!!) move to one of the top tier servers with their giant queues and horrifical ability lag.  At least then when the RNG struck you weren't going to lose--it'd just be a boring week.   Those that remained got pretty used to this and the more optimistic ones settled with "well, because we're two tiers higher than we should be, we'll have an off week and just not WvW(vW) until the match resets."  

Now fast forward to October of this year.  To make WvW(vW) more interesting and to add more "meaning" to ranking and scores and the like, the devs decided that what they really needed to do was break the servers into leagues based on the current tiers then randomly match them up within the leagues to find out who was "best".  Forget for a moment that we already had a pretty good idea who the top servers were (hint:  they were at the top).    Either way, winners in a league would be given some extra super special things which probably include a special finisher and probably more things (unknown at this writing since the first season isn't over yet in fact, all the rewards suck just so's you know).  This is especially maddening because it basically means that unless you're one of the middle servers, most of your matchups will be un-competitive which seems counterproductive in a supposedly competitive game mode.  It's also somewhat disingenuous to give rewards based on match points given that, as discussed above, they are almost completely dominated by population and coverage--two things that the average WvWer has zero control over if they don't want to contribute to the problem.

They Did What?
WvW could have been so much more and it's so close to the magic that DAoC had that it's maddening they didn't pay just a little more attention.  ArenaNet put all the right sounding pieces into play and then hoped that it would work out.  What they actually did was put some of the right pieces onto the wrong map and put the wrong mechanics around them.  Yes you can take and claim keeps in RvR but that wasn't what made it great.  Yes, you could run around in very large groups (and a lot of skill-less people did so) but large scale combat just for the sake of large scale combat is not enough.  Yes, there were three factions which make somethings interesting but it also makes some things really, really hard.  It's like a dance troupe trying to mimic their favorite video but they can't hear the music.  Did they have any seriously competitive PvPers on their design staff at all?

It is all the more disappointing because so much of the game is so well executed.  They have a lot of the right kinds of things but it's seemingly bolted together without an instruction manual.  They actively reward people who have the least skill who take the fewest risks which actively punishing those who take the largest risks.  That is a death's knell for any game with competitive aspirations and one that will not hold a hardcore audience for very long.  The turning point is where fiercely competitive people realize that their contribution doesn't really matter and that every competitive piece is determined by things out of their control namely population and coverage.  Most of them, I suspect, are already gone.

The worst thing about the game is that it could have been great but they settled for good.  Guild Wars 2 snatches defeat from the jaws of victory which is a goddamn shame.

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.