If there’s one thing you can say about Blizzard it’s that they’re good at connecting with their user base. They’re good at hype, at making users feel “special”, and they’re good at (appearing) completely fearless. And yeah, I’m thinking about the contrast here to BioWare’s ridiculous NDA and hyper-managed drip-feed of information for TOR. BioWare dropped the press embargo for TOR 24 hours before BlizzCon? So what. The dribble of information coming from official sites is facile and stage-managed and, honestly, completely useless. It’s also nothing ten seconds with /r/swtor or BetaFootage or AlterSwtor or BetaCake won’t get you.

I think reality might be a bit harsh for BioWare. By all accounts, TOR is pretty good. But it’s not the MMO a lot of people are looking for expect, based on the press statements BioWare likes to make. Unmanaged pundits — the bloggers and the forum-goers and the redditors — are crueller but they’re also honest, and critical reviews are important too, since they set expectations. I’m not expecting TOR to be DA2-in-space, or the successor to SWG, or the game that will bring twitch-based action combat to mainstream MMO mechanics. I’m not expecting that… but a lot of people are, because that’s the all-things-to-all-people impression BioWare’s marketing machine likes to create.

Contrast to Blizzard. Make all the jokes you like about “Pokémon and Pandas”; you can’t accuse the company of trying to hide their dirty laundry. In fact, let’s stop having a tirade about TOR and talk about what we’re actually here for: All Blizzard’s dirty laundry for the next twelve months. Ready?

So Zen. In... China. Ri-ii-ight.

Pokémon and Pandas (World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria)

#1. Kung-fu Azeroth

For all the shit it’s currently getting, I’m pretty sure no-one who’s been a long-time Warcraft fan will bat an eyelid at the inclusion of the Pandaren as the new WoW-race. Sure, the Brewmaster was a “joke” hero from WC3′s secret bonus mission, but Chen was a legitimate companion of Rexxar in WC3′s pre-WoW maps (which apparently no-one played or something), making him one of the integral characters for the settlement of Durotar and the founding of Orgrimmar. Not to mention Samwise Dider just freakin’ loves him some pandas.

Pandaren have been coming for years, and it’s interesting to contrast the reaction over the weekend to the reaction to Ian McConville‘s hoax screenshot which — if I’m remembering correctly — was created back when the Alliance race for Burning Crusade was still an unknown.^[i] For those of you who don’t remember it, people liked the idea back then, and there was actual palpable disappointment when the Alliance race turned out to be the WTF-is-that-lawful-good-devil-goats-in-space-WTF Draenei.

You could probably make some kind of argument that basing an entire expansion around the obviously-Asian-as-imagined-by-Westerners Pandaria is both racially appropriative and an obvious grab for the Asian MMO market. You’d probably be right on both counts. Of course, this is Blizzard we’re talking about, and some of the best concept artists in the business have produced some fucking stunning environmental design, as usual. (Made all the more impressive, as usual, by the WoW engine’s age.)

Honestly, Pandaria just looks cool. It looks fun to explore, to marvel at. For someone like yours truly who pretty much idolises Blizzard’s art team^[ii] the chance to see more of their work is always a joy.

But.

But…

It's amazing what WoW's art team can squeeze out of its ancient engine.

#2. WoWémon

Pet battles. Oh-ka-aa-ay.

Like everyone my initial reaction to this was pretty much “… bwah?”. Then I got to thinking about it a little more and, well, Imma just quote myself from Reddit:

Believe it or not, pet battles already exist in the game… sort of. Two fairly rare pets — the vanilla CE zergling and the original BlizzCon murloc marine — have animations that “fight” each other if they meet in the field; the “outcome” is determined randomly.

People do stand around doing “bet of three, best of five, best of seven…” fight rounds with the pets if they happen to meet each other (like I said; it’s pretty rare, but I have the zergling so I’ve been in a few).

To me, the whole “WoWemon” thing just feels like a more formalised extension of that. Yeah it’s silly, but so are a lot of things in WoW. And, honestly, it certainly sounds like a more fun levelcap diversion than, oh, Archaeology was…

So… I dunno. It sounds totally ridic on paper, but watching the guys explain it during the panel was like… yeah okay. I guess this could be fun. It’s also worth noting that the way they’re implementing it sounds like it could be easily moved out of the game itself and onto — oh, say — mobile devices or browsers. So you collect your pets up in-game, then muck about with them on your iPhone the next day at work. And if you think about it like that, it has the potential to be a lot cleverer than people realise (what with that style of “Facebook game” currently being the biggest gaming market… whether us “oldskool”/”real gamers” like it or not)…

There’s always one “wall of crazy” — to use a BioWare term — announcement with every WoW expansion. We’ve had hero quests, dance studios and Path of the Titans. Now we have this. Remember that Blizzard have a relationship with PopCap and they’ve shown a lot of interest — both with RealID and with some of the stuff they’ve said about Titan — in breaking into the “Facebook games” market. WoWémon is how you do it in WoW, and coupled with WoW’s “endless trial”^[iii] and Blizzard’s already highly talented mobile and website development teams, it could be outrageously successful.

Maybe. If any feature is going to get cut from the game, it’s this but, conversely, if any feature is going to defy its critics and prove to be a breakout success it’s also this. Thing is, I was paying special attention over the weekend and it really was quite noticeable looking back from the front of the pack just how many companion pets were accompanying us on our AV zerg rush. People love those damn things.

So we’ll see.

So. Frakkin'. Beautiful.

#3. Talents 2.0

I don’t really have much to say about Talents 2.0 other than that it seems like a good step towards solving the Problem With Talents. Talents trees are a tired mechanic and they’ve definitely had their day; ironically a realisation I came to by going through TOR’s incredibly uninspiring sets.

What was most interesting about this panel, however, was basically listening to the devs admit mea culpa and openly and honestly discuss the things they failed with in Cata’s Talents 1.5 redesign.

And this is what I mean about Blizzard being fearless; all of this, in fact. About not being afraid to admit they were wrong and not being afraid to throw controversial ideas to the wolves (read: us); raw and unpackaged.^[iv] And this is why I have huge respect for them as a company, and why their games are so successful.

But.

Oh hi there, Generic Hero Guy. Are you still here?

But…

So I will buy my year of WoW, partly for the guaranteed MoP beta (the D3 is nice, but I’ll be getting the CE of that anyway), but mostly to set myself a time limit. Because, come 21 October 2012, I will not be renewing my WoW subscription.^[v] MoP could be the greatest fucking game in the universe and TOR could be a bomb… but I will not be renewing my WoW subscription. It’s just time.

And here’s the thing. I’m not… unhappy with WoW, exactly. I don’t dislike the core game, I’m not “tired” of Azeroth. But…

But. Forgive me while I quote myself again:

Blizzard does mechanics very well but, IMO, they’re terrible at story. It sort of occurred to me over the weekend that the main reason WoW makes me “eh” nowadays is because I have no feeling of… importance? I guess. Purpose? Weight? Like, all the expansions have been about these big, epic takedowns of major lore characters, except… Well, firstly I don’t raid, so I never see that, and secondly all the major game story is driven by Blizzard’s signature characters (e.g. Thrall, Malfurion, King Whiner, various other Square-Jawed Manly Men) and the problem is I just don’t think anyone is really as in love with WoW’s characters as the WoW writers are. And yeah, I’m vain so mostly I’m all like, “Yeah, cool story bro… but what about me?”

And that’s the rub of it, really. I’m just sort of bored of being this tiny cog playing fifth fiddle to Blizzard’s Real Characters who seem to combine teams of faceless raiders with signature characters I don’t connect with in any way, shape, or form. Oh? Bolvar is the new Lich King you say. Well that’s– wait, who the fuck is Bolvar and why do I care about him as opposed to all the other legion of identical, bland square-jawed Blizzard heroes? Protip: I don’t.

And this is why TOR is revolutionary to me: BioWare “gets” that this is a problem, and have tried to address it. Whether they succeed or not is still up for debate, but at least they’ve recognised the issue and tried to do something about it. Blizzard, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem at all.

Which is why my days with WoW are officially numbered. It’s been fun, man, but it’s time to move on.^[vi]

Mmm. Racially-coded.

The acronym is all you really need to know about this game (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm)

Oh SCII, my old nemesis.

I’m honestly conflicted about HotS. On the one hand, it’s a game with a female protagonist and it features not one but three women — named, with speaking parts^[vii] — in its trailer. On the other hand… urgh. How to put this?

Remember how WoL was basically: MEN! DOING MANLY THINGS! LOOK HOW HEROIC AND MANLY MEN DOING MANLY HEROIC THINGS IS! Remember that? Well, watching the lore panel on HotS basically gave me the impression that a lot of this game is going to be about: WOMEN! DOING WEIRD SCARY WOMANLY THINGS! LOOK HOW ALIEN AND WEIRD AND SCARY DOING WOMANLY THINGS IS!

Yeah, the protagonist of HotS is a woman… but she’s also an anti-hero who’s pretty much designed to hit some very specific male fears about female (misuse of) power while still conversely being something of a damsel-in-distress. And yeah, she’s arguably depicted as a woman of colour… but she’s also a “white girl” whose ethnicised “transformation” was specifically done to code her as being scary and alien. Just, protip Blizz — because you might have missed this or whatever — but THAT’S A BIT FUCKING RACIST.

And yeah, some of the main antagonists of HotS are also, erm, female… but again they’re very much in that male-fear-of-female-power mould. I mean, you’ve basically now got a race which explicitly embodies the strawfeminist Hive Vagina concept… while still all managing to be bitchy, catty backstabbers.

As for the plot… well.

In the Q&A at the panel one of the questions was — quite explicitly and totally unironically — along the lines of, “But how ever can Raynor accept Kerrigan back after all the horrible things she’s done? (Woe!)” To which my immediate response was, of course, “Who gives a flying fuck what that jerkass thinks?”

Metzen, of course, had a different answer, most of which was waffling about how “oh yes we’ll totally be exploring that”. However, to his credit — and Maker knows I’m not a huge Metzen fan — he did finally throw in a sentence at the end that was something along the lines of, “… but maybe the more important question is how will Kerrigan learn to accept herself?” To which, of course, I cheered mightily. Finally! Some words out of Chris Metzen’s mouth that don’t make me want to burn every Blizzard product I own in shame!

He then proceeded to launch into a speech — in response to a different question, I believe-but-can’t-be-arsed-to-check — about how Kerrigan has basically been used and abused by everyone she’s ever encountered (he implied this also included Raynor, which is interesting in light of the next bit) and how now that she finally has some freedom in her life she has to choose where it goes next.

And what life options does Metzen think Kerrigan has to choose between?

Why, “the man that she loves or the man that she hates”, of course.

…

…

…

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? NO, SERIOUSLY. TELL ME YOU’RE FUCKING KIDDING ME. TELL ME YOU, SERIOUSLY AND WITHOUT IRONY, JUST SAID THAT. TELL ME IT REALLY, HONESTLY, NEVER ENTERED YOUR GRUNTING LITTLE MIND THAT KERRIGAN MIGHT HAVE SOME KIND OF LIFE OPTION THAT DIDN’T REVOLVE AROUND A MAN.

… ahem.

Dee!Hulk aside: Fuck. That. Shit.

And here’s the thing. It’s so fucking obvious — to the point of Fremdschämen, even — that Raynor is Metzen’s Gary Stu self-insert expy. They look the same, they talk the same, they have that same sort of tedious, overdone masculinity. And, because of that, it’s also painfully obvious that Kerrigan is purely designed to be Metzen’s kind of maiwaifu “ideal girl”. This is like Male Gaze in its purest, most distilled form. It also makes playing SC2 like reading some really terrabad self-insert Brood War fanfic. And it’s just… yeah, no. Do Not Want, and also see point above about no-one really giving as many shits about these characters as the writers apparently do.

SCII in general and Raynor/Kerrigan in particular is sort of like the Bella-and-Edward of videogames. Amusingly, Raynor is the Bella in this set-up, but minor lulz aside the rest is just cringe-worthy. I’m sure there are a lot of brodoodes out there who are all totally on board with Metzen’s teenage power fantasy but, let’s face it, not having ever been a teenage boy I can assure you I don’t empathise. And the Raynor/Kerrigan that apparently exists in Metzen’s mind — and occasionally makes it onto the screen — is every bit as weird and creepy and laughable as Twilight is to most men (and also women, to be fair).

Thing is, I like StarCraft. I know who IMNesTea is and why one half of Tastosis looks suspiciously like Day[9]. I’m mesmerised by watching the fingers of pro players blur across the keyboard. I’m awful at the game itself but I enjoy it as a spectator sport.

But I don’t enjoy it as a story. Not anymore.

Looks like HotS won’t be changing that.

Sometimes, a girl just wants to smash some shit.

Game Mechanics: The Game (Diablo III)

And then there’s D3.

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about D3; it looks awesome, and I shall be buying the CE and look forward to playing it a lot in 2012. That’s… about it.

Diablo 3 is, I think, in many ways the distilled essence of what Blizzard does best. It’s a mechanics game. It looks pretty, runs smooth and — one hopes — is enjoyable to play. The plot is utilitarian but hardly thrilling — there are some guys! and they’re bad! and Deckard Cain wants to tell you to stay a while and listen while he explains about it! — but that works, I think. Because mostly this game is about smashing mobs and getting loot, and from the panel discussions it sounds like they’ve put a lot of thought into how they can make the funnerest monster-smashing-loot-getting game on the market.

And, sometimes, that’s all a girl needs.

1. Incidentally, Blizzard devs, female Pandaren? Look like that, please. Or this.
2. For all their flaws, of which there are many, almost all of which unsurprisingly revolve around their depiction of female characters.
3. The panel devs at BlizzCon specifically stated pet battling could be done at any level, though sneakily loosely coupled higher-tier abilities to character level with the idea of trainers.
4. Well… not really, but they’re at least good at projecting the appearance of such.
5. Er… but I’ll probably still buy the CE. Because, yanno. I have the others and I’m a completest.
6. Also: I will need to find a new name for this blog. Urgh…
7. Okay, the zerg majordomo lady doesn’t speak in the trailer… but one assumes she speaks in the game itself.

permalink » 5 comments » 2,831 words posted in: Opinions, blizzard, blizzard:blizzcon, blizzard:blizzcon:2011, game:diablo, game:diablo:3, game:starcraft:2, game:starcraft:2:heart of the swarm, game:wow, game:wow:mop

… OMG do want.

permalink » comment? » 10 words posted in: Links, art:other people's, game:dragon age:2, game:dragon age:2:mota

Easily the most beautiful set of screenshot from The Old Republic I’ve seen thus far.

This game looks stunning. I do have one tiny gripe, however — which admittedly isn’t so obviou here — in that it appears they’ve used the videogame equivalent of “matte paintings” for the horizon backdrops on at least some of the worlds. I’m tentatively not a fan of this; it can fool players into thinking they’ve got a bigger horizon-line than they do because the matte backdrop isn’t effected by the game’s draw distance. However it also feels a bit like… cheating. And not to mention makes zones feel small (you can’t get away with this trick if you have a huge, multi-zone world; only in places with a “horizon” players can never reach). And bugs out a bit in the middle distance. Hrm.

Guess we’ll see come December.

permalink » comment? » 164 words posted in: Links, game:swtor, screenshots

Well. We knew it was coming, I guess.

Actually, the most disappointing thing about this is that it’s apparently gender-specific. So no, you cannot wear this as a male character (not even an equivalent).

Also, for comparison, the original costume. Oh and no: This isn’t the most egregiously revealing outfit in the game.

permalink » 5 comments » 65 words posted in: Links, game models, game:swtor, girls don't play videogames, quick someone call the body police

Now doesn’t this look familiar…

permalink » comment? » 12 words posted in: Links, game models, game:swtor, quick someone call the body police

What never fails to amaze me is just how easily fooled by abstractions gamers apparently are. People criticise MMORPG quests for being “kill x, fetch y” all the while apparently blithely ignoring the fact that the quests in every RPG are exactly identical. As I’ve probably mentioned before, literally the only difference between a WoW quest and (say) a DA2 quest is the presentation; text that says “kill ten templars” versus four cutscenes of “break into the Chantry and rescue my ex boyfriend and I’ll give you those maps you wanted”.

TOR blends both; it does the cinematics of a single player but it keeps the quest log “honesty” of an MMO. Yet it still gets critics griping that its questing isn’t “innovative” enough.

Guys, seriously. Just turn off your quest objective HUD and… there. Single player RPG questing a go-go.

permalink » 2 comments » 158 words posted in: Links, game:swtor, mechanics:fourth pillar, people:siha, questing

I’m not sure if it’s just the resolution on the video (it looks possibly like it’s 4:3-on-widescreen), but I’m assuming this is Female Body Type #4 and that she looks… bigger than previously. Am I imagining things?

(Also: Class-based racial bonuses? Bet they don’t last…)

permalink » 2 comments » 56 words posted in: Miscellaneous, bioware, game models, game:swtor, quick someone call the body police

Georg Zoeller talks about how BioWare does data collection and analysis for TOR. A very interesting read.

permalink » comment? » 28 words posted in: Links, bioware, development, game:swtor

So — after mentioning Uru in my post the other day — guess what I discovered? Yup, the game is still live! And, better: It’s free!

It’s definitely worth checking out, if you’re into that sort of oldskool puzzle/exploration game. With the exception of the character models, the graphics have held up very well considering the game’s (a-har) age. I had to run the patcher in XP compatibility mode, but otherwise had no problem running in native res on my 30″ — which is something even some recent games have trouble with — so colour me impressed.

I’m still nostalgically working my way through the original, “single player” Ages (memory don’t fail me now), but will hopefully get a more in-depth post up when I figure out what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. (Which, of course, is the main part of the fun in a Myst game.)

permalink » comment? » 155 words posted in: Links, Massive Multiplayer, cyan worlds, game:myst:uru

Imagine you could create your ideal, perfect, play-this-forever MMORPG, but it had to be constructed out of elements from pre-existing MMO games. So you could take, say, the player economy from EVE and the setting from LotRO and the graphics from EQ2 and the PvP from Warhammer Online. Or what have you.

What would you pick? What would be your ideal MMO, within these caveats?

Ooh! Sounds fun; let’s play!

Class and levelling design

I’m going to have to nominate pre-F2P Champions Online (or the “gold” archetypes or whatever they’re now called) system for this one. Basically imagine a RIFT-esque system but without even the limitation of classes, where skills can be bought either by having x number of pre-requisite points in that tree or by having x+y number of points overall.

Why do I like it? Basically because I’m a mostly-solo player who loves hybrid utility. Strict role-based classes are, I think, an artefact of the DnD/EQ days where soloing wasn’t part of the core gameplay. Unfortunately the focus on 1-vs-1 or small-group PvP in MMOs has had a tendency to keep them in, since they’re easier for devs to “balance” (read: for 1-vs-1 PvP).

I like freeform progression systems because they give players better freedom to design the sorts of characters that fit with their play style, rather than forcing them into specific roles formed from the perceptions of others (think the Druid who wants to DPS, but is invariably forced into healing). Of course, it’s easy to gimp yourself with freeform, meaning that there needs to be some kind of flexible “recovery” system; either time-based (a la EVE where “speccing wrong” mostly just means taking the time to re-train) or money-based (CO respecs).

Actually, flexibility to TheoryCraft and make mistakes is probably the core component of my “perfect” levelling system. I’m not a fan of games that make you live with every mistake you’ve ever made, partly because that tends to be indicative of a something with no active development (just imagine if WoW, with all the changes it’s made since release, didn’t allow respeccing) but mostly because it results in cookie-cutter builds. You think WoW or RIFT are bad for that? Then obviously you’ve never played something — mine was Ragnarok Online — where there are literally only a handful of viable specs per class,^[i] despite there being thousands of possible specs. Now imagine trying to luck into one of those playable specs as a newbie.

Yeah. Not fun.

Flexibility and user-customisation are the name of the game on this one. As to how it’s achieved mechanically…

Some of you may remember I come from a White Wolf tabletop background rather than a DnD-based one. This probably explains my disdain for strict class differentiation — WW games don’t have it per se, at least not in the way DnD does — and it’s also indicative of the fact I’m a bit ho-hum over level-based advancement. I like the idea of having skills you level through use (IIRC, Saga of Ryzom does this) or, slightly more abstracted, buy directly via experience. So I’m quite interested in things like the EVE/Glitch skill system (skills are bought directly, with “time” in place of XP). I haven’t played much AoC, but I believe that game has something similar with its “Alternate Advancement”.

At any rate, my Platonic MMO would definitely be ditching the dings and the levels for something more along these lines.^[ii]

Questing system

Let’s face it, there’s really only one player in this town and it’s World of Warcraft. Even single-player games like Dragon Age 2 and Fallout 3 have, at their heart, functionally the same questing system as WoW, albeit abstracted somewhat; DA2 might have your quest objective as “blow up the Chantry” but mechanically the quest is still “kill 10 templars”.^[iii]

That’s not to say I think WoW’s quests are perfect — if nothing else, they could certainly do with a bit more of the aforementioned abstractions — only that I’m not sure what a questing system would look like, if not this.

PvP

Firstly: Not only do I not like 1-vs-1/Arena-style PvP but I actively don’t think it should be part of the MMO genre. This stuff is what MOBAs were invented for, so if you want that sort of gameplay, go play one of those instead.

Secondly: I don’t like Open World PvP. It’s fine if that’s your thing, it just isn’t mine. Let me hang out on my PvE server and you can keep your PvP rule set to yourself. What can I say? I’m allergic to ganking and am the wrong gender to have an e-peen, so this stuff just doesn’t excite me. (Actually, from what I’ve heard, the lack of open world PvP on so-called “PvP” servers is somewhat indicative that it doesn’t particularly excite PvP players, either.)

That being said, there’s one type of PvP I love and that’s lobby-based battlegrounds; the more objective-focused the better. Old-style multi-day AVs are perfect, and their modern-day zerg-rush equivalents aren’t too bad either (yeah, I went there).

The point of lobby-based PvP is that the team are normalised somewhat: Fixed team numbers, level brackets, buffing up disadvantaged members or teams. That sort of thing. Getting ganked over and over by players you have no hope of beating, who you know are only harassing you because they take active pleasure in your impotent misery, is not fun (and also kinda makes me despair for humanity). Tearing through a battlefield because your team understands strategy and cooperation, however? Yeah. I’ll take me some of that.

Crafting

As we’ve already established, I pretty much don’t care about crafting in games so… honestly I have no opinion on this one. Which isn’t to say I want no system, only that I have no preference for what, exactly, that is…

Achievements

This one would have to be Lord of the Rings Online. I’d be lying if I said I played a great deal of that game, but I did enjoy the Deed (I think it was) system whereby the game encouraged you to do things you normally might not — be they grinding goblins or delivering pies — in order get tangible character benefits. WoW-style “you did this, now have a popup” achievement systems I can take or leave; I don’t dislike them, but I don’t really see the point in most cases.

I guess there’s really two ideas at play here: One is a kind of “character journal” that records things you’ve done, important milestones and whatnot; the other is sort of an extension of the quest/levelling system. Both are okay, but in my Perfect Game they’d be separated out in some more logical fashion I haven’t really thought of yet and don’t have a real-world example for. (Yeah yeah that’s bending the rules; so shoot me…)

Travel

Two requirements: A taxi service, and some kind of player-directed flight. Yes I love flying mounts, no they don’t “ruin immersion”^[iv] and — as we’ve already discovered — I don’t care about world PvP and play on PvE servers anyway.^[v]

Speed-boost powers/mounts are a must, even starting from relatively low levels. Yeah, the world is epic, but running across it forty times at foot-pace is just tedious. Besides, if your world design is actually engaging and beautiful I’m going to get off my mount and walk around it anyway; q.v. Grizzly Hills, which I still think is one of the most subtly beautiful game zones ever designed. One of the things that really killed Aion for me was just how hideously ugly and bland the world was.^[vi] One of the things I’m most looking forward to in TOR is being able to explore the stunning scenery in 30″ high-def rather than pixel-crufted YouTube res.

The one thing I absolutely don’t want, on the other hand, is Forsaken/Perfect World-style “auto-route to quest location” functionality. On the surface of it this seems like exactly the sort of thing I should enjoy. It isn’t. You want to talk about something “immersion breaking”? Couple this with unengaging next-next-next quest “text” and there you have it.

Wardrobes/cosmetic gear

I’m in two minds to this. My first one is typified by games like Co* and CO where avatar appearance is completely decoupled from gear. My second is games that implement wardrobes a la LOtRO, AoC, RIFT and almost every F2P game ever. Either is fine, so long as I have the opportunity to look epic.^[vii]

User interface

Honestly? I don’t care what the default user interface looks like or does, so long as I get a mod API a la WoW’s. I know it’s very trendy to whine about GearScore and DPS meters and whatnot, but the truth of it is I’m incredibly anal-retentive and love my screen to look just so. If that means Bartender4, Button Facade, Power Auras, X-Perl and IceHUD? So be it. Back in earlier iterations of the API I had an incredibly dynamic custom UI filled with pop-out mousover ability stacks — think like the Shaman totem stacks, except custom-defined — and a single “main bar” that reacted dynamically depending on whether I was targeting a hostile or an ally. Oh, those days!^[viii]

Other musts: Something like Auctioneer and something that auto-summons a random companion pet for me. Yeah, I’m both lazy and vain.

Concl– Wait. Aren’t we missing something?

It occurred to me, when I was writing this, that there was something missing from Siha’s original post. Something I’d been reading a lot about recently, so it was obviously critically important to some MMO players… but not important enough for Siha to notice its exclusion^[ix] and not important enough to me personally to catch it right away (or any of the commenters on Siha’s post).

Have you got it yet? Go on: If you haven’t already spoiled yourself, re-read the list above and see if you can figure out what it is. I think it’s one of those things, like Petals Around the Rose, that’ll either be immediately obvious or confounding elusive. It’ll also, I think, say a lot about you as a gamer.

Got it? Give up?

Combat

Yeah. I know, right? Nothing at all about the combat system.

I’m pretty sure the only reason I picked this up as an exclusion is because it encompasses most of the Guild Wars 2 versus The Old Republic pundit battle currently going on in the MMOsphere. It’s probably neither a secret nor unfair to say TOR is basically WoW-with-voice-acting, but whether that sounds terrible or awful to you is probably determined almost solely by how much importance you place on combat as a game mechanic. For people like me to whom combat is… a thing that’s there (to put it mildly), WoW’s system is perfectly adequate. So BioWare-does-WoW sounds like pretty much the greatest thing ever. It’s really only the people who want some flavour of combat that doesn’t involve hotkeys and clicking that are predicting the game’s imminent demise.^[x] These are the people who are practically salivating over GW2′s promised dynamic combat system. Yanno, the one that sounds like an entire game of tedious “don’t stand in the fire” mechanics to the rest of us.

The fact of the matter is I don’t really like twitch-based MMOs. Or, well, twitch-based games really. And, honestly? I could do without combat in an MMO all together.

Maybe.

I think.

Frankenstein and the Monster weren’t exactly BFFs…

So okay. My Platonic Ideal MMO is a non-combat, story-driven themepark game based on freeform progression, but in which crafting isn’t the major point. What the hell does it look like?

The fact of the matter is I don’t know. I’ve never seen it; most non-combat MMOs I can think of off the top of my head are sandboxes with a focus on crafting — the absolute purest incarnation of this form being, of course, Second Life – and honestly I can’t think of anything worse.

I think my game might look a little bit like Uru; Cyan Worlds’ ill-fated MMO based in the Myst universe. It probably looks a lot like oldskool puzzle adventure games a la Zork, or maybe a modern non-combat survival horror like Amnesia. It would definitely have one of my favourite game mechanics of all time, one I’ve only ever (personally) encountered in Return to Zork: Photography.^[xi] Players would be able to take photos of things and places in the game, with their Photography skill influencing the quality of the shot and the uberness of the camera they can use. Most importantly, photos could be shown to NPCs and to other players to either trigger quest progression or to form the basis of group puzzles.

So say you know there’s Some Item in a particular location but your Investigation skill isn’t high enough to “reveal” it. But you’re pretty good with Photography, so you take some snapshots around the area and send them to your more investigative friend. She can look at the photos and have her Investigation skill trigger as if she were physically there herself (with a penalty ameliorated by your Photography skill plus a little randomness). The game gives her “sparklies” on the photo where the usable item is; she can mark it out and send the marked photos back to you. You can check out her notes and get a bonus to your own Investigation (based on hers, of course) which — if all is well — will reveal the item in question to you at its original location. You can then grab them item, take it back to a quest NPC, and weasel you way through the subsequent dialogue sequence with your Persuasion.

That’s what my Platonic MMO would look like, I think. It’s about puzzles and it’s about dialogue and it’s about exploration.

It also doesn’t exist. At all, as far as I’m aware. I’m not even sure if it can exist; it’s so out there and, potentially, so niche that it’s doubtful any development studio would even attempt to take something like this on.^[xii] And — as per the moral of Frankenstein itself — maybe, ultimately, I wouldn’t even want it if they did.

Maybe. Maybe not.

But, in the meantime, I’ll take TOR. A little story is better than nothing.

1. Yeah, that’s “viable” not “optimal”. A non-viable spec in RO wasn’t just “a bit worse” than a viable one; it was actively unplayable.
2. Yeah yeah content normalisation yeah yeah. It’s a Platonic ideal, all right? That means it’s allowed to be unrealistically perfect!
3. Legacy is probably the best example of this. Behind all the pretty voice acting it’s still essentially a quest chain of “kill 20 dwarves”, “kill 1 boss”, “kill 50 Darkspawn”, “kill 1 elite”.
4. I always find it telling, incidentally, that every. Single. Person who argues against flying mounts still, yanno, actually uses them. Also “it runs immersion” is like MMO Godwin’s. Stop it.
5. Actually, in my Platonic MMO flying mounts would be banned on PvP servers; there, problem fixed. Enjoy your world PvP.
6. Honestly, I have a similar problem with RIFT. It’s very pretty just… sort of dull and a bit soulless.
7. Fun fact: If I’m being totally honest, I’ve always chased epic looking gear more so than, well, epic gear. I didn’t used to get heartbreakingly envious over The Elements because it was a blue with “leet stats”. I got envious because it looked fucking awesome. This is always the core of my gripe with WoW “epics”; I don’t care about the purples per se, and I think I’m not alone. Give “casuals” a way to grind blue gear with identical, colour-shifted models as the raid sets and I guarantee there’ll be a whole lot less whinging… Well, from the non-raiders, at any rate.
8. Seriously I should try to dig out some screenshots. That thing was epic.
9. I’m assuming she didn’t leave it out on purpose, of course.
10. TOR might very well still fail but, to be perfectly honest, it’s going to fail by not delivering the afore-promised “Fourth Pillar” storytelling, not because it uses 1-= hotkeys. Some of the leaks from permanent beta indicate this may be a concern — like AoC, all the quality story content apparently is stacked towards TOR’s beginning, thinning out in later levels — but the people complaining about this tend to also be the people who are most critical of its combat as well, so who knows.
11. I believe Glitch has something similar, but I’ve only just trained it and haven’t used it yet in-game, so couldn’t tell you.
12. Though, yanno. If you want to…

permalink » 2 comments » 2,777 words posted in: Massive Multiplayer, Opinions, game design