Voice acting, it works!

I’ve always enjoyed the voice acting in the Bioware games, especially in the Mass Effect series, and therefore it isn’t all that surprising that I like it in SWTOR as well. What is surprising, though, that I’m actually following the story in an MMO – and all thanks to the voice acting. I’m not quite sure yet how things will pan out once I start playing alts, but for now quests actually feel like quests as opposed to random markers on the map that lead to (usually insignificant) rewards. The quests themselves aren’t all that different from the standard MMO fare, but the voice acting and “cutscenes” make me feel actually involved.

Companion crafting is weird

SWTOR diverts form other MMOs in that you aren’t doing your crafting yourself, but instead task your companions/crew with it and reap the rewards. Not only can you make them craft items from resources, you can also send them on missions to gather those resources for a bit of money. The odd thing is, though, that you don’t get to tell your crew to go gather lightsaber crystals while you yourself go to bed, but instead need to give them new commands every couple of minutes. This leads to an odd sort of gameplay in which you constantly tell the companions you left behind what to work on next, even when you’re in the middle of fighting your way through an enemy stronghold. To be fair, it seems as if crafting/mission times get longer with increasing level so maybe things won’t seem as stupid any more at higher levels. At the point I was at though, things were plenty stupid. My crew would even be so kind as to directly place newly crafted items in my inventory even though they took the raw materials out of my vault. It’s just weird and absolutely no improvement over more “normal” crafting systems.

Bioware stories and MMOs don’t mix all that well

I like how the story works out in the game overall, it is fun, but it tend to get awkward when confronted with the MMO elements of the game. For one, characters entering a conversation/cutscene simply stand next to the NPC that started the scene with a bubble over their head indicating that they are in a conversation. That conversation my include NPCS walking away, others appearing and so on, but you only see that for your own conversation. This leads to scenes in which dozens of characters run into a door and stop there with those chat bubbles over their heads while each one sees their own version of the story playing out.

Larger story elements use instanced regions instead. I’ll give it to Bioware, the transfer between the world and such an instanced area is absolutely smooth. The lack of savegames can create quite weird situations though. In one case, I was ambushed by a set of Sith who kept one of my companions hostage. I started a fight, died, resurrected, ran back in the instance and the Sith were patiently waiting for me to come back and rescue my friend. Now, this happens in other MMOs as well, I’m sure, but I never really notice because I don’t actually follow the story. The expectation in a Bioware MMO game, however, would be either a full reload (which is something gamers have accepted by now) or the hostage being dead or the Sith having run away. Instead, there are no consequences and there’s an odd freeze in time while people wait for me.

On rails space battles are enjoyable

The space battles in SWTOR remind me a lot of good old Rebel Assault, being almost identical in gameplay to the 1993 game. Your ship will fly its course on rails and you get to shoot stuff in your way. You get some minor control over the ship’s movement, allowing you to dodge debris and such, but mostly you are just pointing your crosshairs at things and shooting. Oddly enough, it is quite a lot of fun. I don’t know how long it will stay fun, but the on-rails character of these missions allows the designers to actually put you in the middle of Star Wars battles, shooting down interceptors and performing bombing runs on imperial star destroyers. These are also a nice distraction from the normal gameplay, a minigame if you will.

The world seems huge

The planets are really big and you never feel confined to small spaces. Additionally, the placement of enemies makes some sense, unlike the usual clustering of enemies in an MMO. I can’t really say how much bigger the world is than, say, that of World of Warcraft, but it sure feels a lot bigger. And hey, zoning by planets means never-ending expandability without having to invent new continents all the time.

Overall, my beta experience was enjoyable, if short. I don’t really see myself raiding or some such in the game (the combat is too similar to WoW for that to be appealing anymore) but I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy leveling and playing with friends.

I don’t know how often I’ve heard people complaining about movies not being logical or people in movies ignoring better solutions for a problem. Me, I prefer to simply enjoy the action/dialogue/pictures/soundtrack/world/whatever of the movie without going to deep into the analysis of it all. This is me willingly suspending my disbelief and I think it is absolutely required to enjoy pretty much any work of fiction.

I highly doubt that someone like Nils purposefully spoils his gaming experience by looking for details that do not fit. Maybe the (lack of) weather-appropriate clothing worn by the dwellers of Skyrim jumps out to him as much as the (lack of) clothing of the messenger early in the game jumped out to me. Now, that messenger wore nothing but a loincloth and seemed quite comfortable in the snow – a rather obvious feature. Probably there are many people who simply look at the world in much more detail than I do, or analyze things more deeply. Maybe that means that those people are more intelligent than I am, I don’t know.

What I do know is that a certain amount of ignorance makes many things much more enjoyable. Take the upcoming Doctor Who movie that got announced recently. When I read the news, my first thought was literally “awesome”. I like movies and I love Doctor Who, therefore the prospect of a Doctor Who movie is exciting to me. Most vocal fans of the series on the internet reacted quite differently though. Apparently the movie is not only going to be awful, but it will also destroy the whole series through its awfulness.

Sure, the movie might be quite bad. I’ll probably still enjoy it because I don’t really care whether the continuity is followed and things are done exactly to canon. That’s like caring whether an actress in a movie has the same hair color as described in the underlying book. Whatever. Still, I can see how Hollywood could turn Doctor Who into quite an awful piece, but I can’t see how that would even remotely touch upon the rest of the series.

Once again, I can simply ignore such a movie if it is bad. I can even ignore continuity breaks between a movie and a TV series just as I can ignore the contradiction between snow and sleeveless shirts.

The controls and the general user interface are awful, it’s true. My character contracted a disease last night and I couldn’t, for the life of me, find a screen that told me what the disease did or whether I still had it. There is no character screen; you don’t actually get to look at any form of stats in a condensed form. Instead you get a variety of menus that have been simplified to fit console controls and through that simplification got rather cumbersome to use indeed.

Graphics are similarly mixed. Just like in Oblivion before, stills often look awesome and especially the landscapes are fantastic. Animations, though, are still rather bad and console textures are, well, console textures. Why game companies think that using textures made for five year old gaming machines on my modern PC is beyond me. Console graphics are far from the bee’s knees these days and clearly PC gamers are still a huge part of the RPG market. Bioware at least released a high resolution texture pack for Dragon Age 2.

The gameplay itself reminds me a lot of the older titles of the series (surprise, surprise), though the character system has been completely revamped. The choice inherent in the perks system is quite awesome, and it looks as if I could be playing a huge variety of different characters. It is a bit odd, that leveling any skill (including, say, blacksmithing) ultimately increases the strength of NPC enemies – but that is a topic for a full post.

Combat as a melee fighter works fine, but the animations have a tendency to be weird. Worst of all are the slow-motion killing blows that seem to happen all the time and get repetitive after a while. I have yet to find a toggle to turn that off, but maybe some .ini file is going to help me out. There also seem to be some sort of critical strikes that do incredibly high amounts of damage. Sometimes I’d whack on some enemy for a while without doing any real damage and then suddenly they’d just drop dead. This can be quite annoying because it adds a lot of randomness to the combat outcome. At multiple points in character’s short career, I would attack an enemy, get obliterated, reload, and kill the enemy without so much as a scratch on me.

I love that there are giants that kill me in one hit, quests with multiple solutions to them, and quest givers that will actually accept a quest that I completed before they told me to do so. I love that there is a huge world with lots of secrets to explore and fully voiced NPCs to talk to. I’ll definitely enjoy playing Skyrim despite its flaws, but I do expect having absolutely no issues coming up with a “10 bad things about Skyrim” post. Others already have.

Now, according to the usual subjects in game design writing, a game needs a goal (or outcome) to qualify as such. Crawford, Costikyan, Salen and Zimmerman, and others all agree on that simple fact. I, for one, consider Europa Universalis to be a game. Who am I to disagree with the likes of a Chris Crawford though?

The thing is, playing Europa Universalis without a goal reduces the fun by quite a bit. Maybe it stops being a game and is degrade to the level of a toy at that point. As it turns out, though, it is quite efficient to set your own goals for it. Playing as Brandenburg? Why not form Prussia or Germany? (Or both!) Playing as Navarra? Maybe trying to survive is a worthy goal all by itself.

I’m not really used to playing my games like that, and it does feel odd not to get any victory screen telling me how well (or badly) I did, but it does work to a certain degree. I still think that actual victory conditions are preferable, but this does put an interesting view on game design and all those clever definitions of what a game is. You see, if I can turn this toy into a game by simply adding my own rules, why can’t I do that with each and every toy?

Thinking further, what about the requirement of “rules” to be considered a proper game? Europa Universalis surely has rules, but they are simply defining the physics of my “toy”. A yo-yo is defined by similar rules, so is Europa Universalis no more a game than a Yo-Yo is? Or, if EU is a game and the Yo-Yo a simple toy, what is the real definition for a game?

This post doesn’t really have a point to get to; I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. I’m just questioning definitions I’ve considered valid for quite a while now.

Oh, and this clearly applies to MMORPGs as well. (What, with them never ending.) Curious.

What the …?

There are definitely many people playing games on their smartphones today, and one could say that the other current types of smartphones have been influenced by the iPhone (and its app store.) Is that what we should consider to be the face of gaming these days though? Is mobile gaming on your phone bigger than each of PC gaming, console gaming, and facebook gaming individually? Is it fair to say that Tim Berners Lee has had only 15% of the influence on modern gaming that Steve Jobs had?

I think not. Either these games industry insiders are completely out of touch, or they simply focus on the newest fad in the how-to-make-money-with-video-games playbook. Or am I simply out of touch? Don’t I know what a gamer is these days anymore? Am I a dying breed? Was all the hype about social games just completely misguided and iPhone games are where it’s really at? Have people who make actual games (aside from Gabe Newell) had no meaningful influence on the shape of gaming today? What about one of the Richards (Bartle, Garriott)?

I call bullshit on this survey. What about you?

Germany has always been a rough ground for companies where privacy is concerned. We both have rather restrictive laws on the topic and a large portion of interested populace. The current issue with Origin quickly found its way into mainstream media outlets as well and even got retailers like Amazon to take back opened and used copies of PC games (Battlefield 3, which by now has 2230 1-star reviews out of 2429 reviews on the German Amazon).  I’m pretty sure that neither the EULA nor the spyware functions of Origin are legal in Germany and it is to be expected that there will be a change sooner or later. The question is though whether it will be in time for SW:TOR or not.

If not, I’m in a bit of a conundrum. I really want to try SW:TOR, but I don’t see myself giving EA the right to spy out everything I do and share it with third parties as well! It’s bad enough that all my online behavior is being tracked by Google, Facebook, and co, but having even my offline behavior spied upon is just wrong. Not even to speak about the fact that I have sensitive data on my machine that I’m not legally allowed to share with EA. By giving them the option to scan my hard drive I’m essentially committing a felony. I’m not prepared to do that.

I don’t really care about BF3 and I’ll just hope that the German protests will lead to a change fast enough – , and they probably will. It seems really odd to me, though, that other countries don’t seem to care.

Sure, you are not going to get a 12 month subscription for WoW at the price of a single game, but what about, say, 3 months? Then current WoW players might be inclined to try out Diablo III (and spend money in the auction house!) at a slightly higher price than their normal subscription, while Diablo III players might be tempted to try some (or get back to) WoW.

Getting people back to WoW is profitable even when they are not paying for a while. For one some will get hooked again and stay after the three months are over (profit). For another, people will want to actually use their three months. To do that they need more than the base game (newcomers) or they’ll want the newest expansion. People like me, for example, who stopped in WotLK, will be very tempted to get Cataclysm now that their subscription is already paid for. Profit!

Blizzard will lose some money on those players that would actually have had a WoW subscription for the three months after the Diablo III release AND would have bought Diablo III anyway. Now I don’t have any studies telling me whether that would cost Blizzard more money than it would make, but I frankly doubt it. This current promotion won’t have a big effect at all, simply because a 12 months subscription is so much more than the price of Diablo III that I doubt many people will bite. Hell, I already know only a few people who go with 3 month plans in their MMOs and no one who uses a 6 month setup. (Though I do know some people with lifetime subscriptions to other MMOs.)

Then, while you’re at it, include 12 months of subscription into the collector’s edition of Diablo III. That might be what they are doing anyway, however. (As they said that the CE price will count towards the price of your WoW 12 months subscription and the current trend in CE pricing goes towards $150.)

I’m not sure if I would go back to WoW even under these conditions, but I would at least consider it. And then probably buy Cataclysm to get my hands on actual new content. Profit!

“[…] eventually you end up with a game that’s designed more like a slot machine than half-life 2.” – Notch, on F2P games

I’ll begin by saying that Heroes VI is not really a bad game. It has everything that the old games of the series had and added new features. These features aren’t generally bad either. You get actual talent trees (though they are a bit too bloated for my taste), you don’t need to have transport heroes scouring the whole map for troops to recruit every week, and you have a good/evil system (excuse me, that should read “tears/blood”) that changes your hero’s capabilities depending on your style of play. They also added a whole slew of special abilities for combat units to make fights more intricate and tactical.

Except they don’t, really. Combat is the exact same maneuvering and uses essentially the same tactics that have worked in the predecessors. All the added bells and whistles just have some incidental effects and don’t really touch on the (now incredibly outdated) game play at all. But I could have fun with some good old Heroes-style battles; I quite enjoyed King’s Bounty recently after all. What irks me about them is the feeling that the developers just didn’t care. There is no love to be found in the animation, the graphics, or the abilities. This extends past the combat system to the campaign dialogue as well. It’s all just terribly bland.

Fully voiced dialogue is nice and all, but pretty useless if the dialogue itself isn’t worth the paper it’s been written on. The same goes for combat animations as well as item and skill design. Units always use the same lame combat animations unless they get a lucky hit which will “reward” you with a zoom in on the fighting units and a couple of seconds of bad animations in close-up. You can probably turn those off, and I definitely would if I meant to spend more time on the game. It feels as if they simply took elements that worked well in other games and gave them a half-hearted, bland implementation. Don’t even get me started on the weird point systems (yes, multiples) that they have for accruing rewards outside the actual game.

Then there’s Europa Universalis. A game that has been created on a sliver of the budget that Heroes IV had (I assume) and that really doesn’t give a rats ass about presenting itself nicely. The developers might have heard about “easy to learn, hard to master” but only joined the conversation half-way through that sentence. The game is, quite frankly, a mess. Even after multiple patches and expansions, the game is buggy as hell and it doesn’t tell you about anything. Once you get the hand of it, the game is mostly about waiting and adjusting a multitude of sliders. I quite enjoy it.

Unlike the Total War series, EU focuses much more on empire management and diplomacy and completely disregards tactical battles. When two enemy armies meet, they’ll fight automatically in a rather simple combat system. You can watch the progress of the battle as a set of bars and numbers and decide to flee at some point if you wish to do so. The empire management part on the other hand is incredibly deep. Not only do you decide on what kind of research to spend your countries GDP (and how much of it to use to mint money – beware of inflation!), you also get to make a myriad of decisions around your empire, decide which advisors to hire, set support limits for your army, navy, colonial and missionary efforts, send merchants to various centers of trade, elect rulers, arrange royal marriages, convert or kill natives, deal with heretics, influence the pope and much more.

The depth of the game is part of what makes it attractive to me. It is somewhat akin to Civilization, but where Sid Meier uses rough approximations for pretty much everything, EU goes much deeper. Interested in declaring war on another nation? Then you’d better have a casus belli (a justification for war) or your empire will take a huge stability loss and other nations will hate you. Interested in colonizing the new world? I hope you have a decent explorer to send with your ships and enough investment in naval technology so that your colonists can actually reach the Americas. And do you want to support mercantilism or free trade? Quantity or quality?

Possibly the biggest draw is the amount of historical accuracy they manage to put into the game through the properties of individual nations. The game doesn’t even try to be fair, so you probably won’t see the Aztecs conquering France or similar atrocities so common in games of Civilization. That’s fine though as it allows you to choose your difficulty level (and play style) by choosing which nation to play as.

The game is certainly not for everyone, but in my case it will absolutely take precedence over the much more expensive Heroes VI. It’s a niche game for sure, but I am quite happy with the existence of such games.  Mainstreaming and lack of interest on the side of the developers have killed the Heroes series for me. Niche games might make less money, but they sure are good for us customers.

The best way, I think, is to do it just like many authors do it. Throw the player right into the story and explain nothing at first. Those things that really have to be explained can be done stealthily. Have the player character pass by a classroom in which the teacher tells her class about the geography of the world or have them stumble upon a book that explains background information on the current king. What’s even better is to allow the player to infer information about the world from conversations and actions they witness. Have them build their own picture of the world through observation, not exposition.

There’s no need to tell the player of Dragon Age: Origins about the Xenophobia of humans and they way that they treat other races. Instead, you simply get to witness behavior and conversations that let you draw your own clues on how the world works. Maybe it doesn’t have to be done in such a heavy handed way as DA:O does, but the concept is still sound.

Dragon Age has another useful concept for explaining further details about the world and pretty much anything that goes on in the game: the codex. The codex is a book that automagically fills itself with information on pretty much everything you encounter. If you don’t care what a revenant is, you can just kill it and move on. If you do, you can check out the codex entry that conveniently unlocked the second that you met your first revenant.

Some might argue that this is immersion breaking in nature because it makes no sense. (Why would my book suddenly fill with information on things I knew nothing about before?) I’m not sure if this is actually a big issue (suspension of disbelief and all) but even if it is, what’s there to say against a codex that is already filled with information from the start of the game? As long as books have been invented in your game world, there really isn’t any reason against some sort of compendium full of information that a citizen of your world should know. You could even use it to enhance immersion by including inaccurate information that you could then (automatically or manually) annotate as you find out things that are not common knowledge. And wouldn’t that make for a nice inclusion in your collector’s edition? Or swag to sell?

I’m sure there are other ways out there that help you avoid amnesia (or similar excuses) without having to drastically alter your story or include a lengthy exposition arc. (I’m looking at you, Fallout 3.) Whatever you do, please keep away from amnesia. I have actually put away games within the first five minutes of playing because of that lame excuse. Make a bit of an effort, it isn’t all that expensive.