Category Archives: General Game-related Blathering

Schoolyard Bullies

2013-07-24Even More General Blathering, General Game-related Blatheringflosch

Go and read this: http://eq2wire.com/2013/07/24/character-blocked-from-eq2u-due-to-trademark-claim/

Then decide whether you want to laugh or cry. Short version: Feldon, tireless tinkerer behind EQ2Wire, one of the most, if not the most useful EQ2 site (news, armory, gear lookups, etc. all in one place) is bullied by some guy who claims he has a trademark on a character name, despite the fact that

EQ2Wire only provides a WoW-armory-like frontend to API data that is publicly accessible from SOE servers,
the claim that a character name infringes on his wordmark because, among many other things, is registered for a classification that, again among many other things, includes “Game services provided on-line from a computer network” sounds quite spurious,
the character was named before his trademark was registered.

I especially like the part where the guy says

I can not understand why do you make such trouble. The easy way is delete it. You can then tell your client that he breaks laws. What is easier for you? deleting ONE user or making your website unavailable for all European countries?

I can’t help but read this in a fake Italian Mafia movie voice: “Luigi, why are you making-a this so difficult-a for me-a?” This, by the way, is also where the bullying comes in. You could, of course, try to explain your points and give proof to your claims instead of shouting “IT’S VERBOOOOTEN!” and having Feldon run around and do the footwork. But why if it’s easier to just claim someone’s website will be offline in all of Europe (yeah right) at a snap of your finger?

Despite the outlandish sounds of this silliness, the guy isn’t actually completely out of his mind in all points, I’m afraid. Though thankfully, his claims at least look haphazardly stitched together. The guy is probably annoyed that after (supposedly) tanking his business and letting expire his domain, one of the first hits on google is to a Dark Elf character on Antonia Bayle who likes to RP evil, and claims some unsavory deeds in his character’s biography, such as “murder, treason, and poisioning[sic] the Qeynos water supply”.

Despite coming from a family of law practitioners, I never studied it myself, so I won’t try and give my non-expert opinion here. But it’s probably not a 100% frivolous claim, as much as I wished it were. If you look long and hard enough at each point, you can find things you could argue in favor of that guy, if you had to. I hope Feldon will have a chance to talk to SOE (as a premier EQ2 site, he seems to have some good contacts over there), and maybe can get an opinion from their legal department. Hopefully, they’ll tell him not to worry, and either rename the character (the sad solution), or give him some big company backing (since this indirectly also touches the issue of their public API data), and hope the guy reconsiders after he’s called on his bluff.

Of course, chances for the sad solution are much higher because it requires less work and expenses from SOE’s side.

This is the world we’re living in, girls and boys.

If I had the money, I’d be thinking about registering every single character name I ever used as a wordmark now. These days, playing the stupid trademark game seems to be the only way to get rid of the scourge of trademark frivolity.

What makes fights good or bad? (or: why do most dynamic events suck?)

2013-07-18Final Fantasy XIV, General Game-related Blatheringdynamic events, game designflosch

When I described my experiences with the FFXIV beta, I also talked about their implementation of short, in-the-world, invasion type events (Rifts, public quests, etc.):

FFXIV adds the en-vogue public event things, were you have a marker on your map and then rush off to mash your buttons like crazy to kill stuff and get XP. Never been a big fan of those either, because it seems the best solution to large amounts of players that developers have come up with so far is scaling the HP of mobs to ridiculous levels, which makes these events tedious, but still not really a social thing, because everybody just mashes buttons and then leaves without a word after the enemy keels over.

Bhagpuss argues in a comment:

[M]y favorite innovation in MMOs of late is the huge all-pile-on fights you don’t like. I can happily mash buttons for hours in a huge crowd fighting a big monster – what’s not to like about that?

I’ll try to give my personal answer to this question in the form of a post. I’ll probably make it sound like a law of design, but I’m quite sure it isn’t. I just tried to order my thoughts into categories that make sense to me. The “why” is certainly an open question to me, and you’re welcome to point out flaws or suggest additional aspects.

I came up with three factors that make fights good for me:

Meaningful Interaction
Rhythm
Variation

Meaningful Interaction: I am with a group of people. We see a fearsome monster. How should we tackle it? Do I have abilities that debuff the monster in ways that increases the effectiveness of my party members? Do they have abilities that do the same for me? Part of the fun can be figuring out those combos and putting them to use. That’s a bit like using combos in card games such as Magic. This kind of interaction is meaningful because it provides fun due to interaction of mechanics. Another meaningful interaction would be outside the mechanics of the game, and purely social. It’s what old EQ players like to tell the younglings when they gather round a fire. Sitting in a location for hours and talking to each other while waiting for carefully paced respawns popping. Which leads me to the next point…

Rhythm: Good fights should provide me with a rhythm of action and downtime. That rhythm comes naturally if I am on my own and not on some sort of timed quests. I can roam around and pull mobs whenever I feel like it. I can pull them as fast or as slow as I want (provided I am careful with social or proximity aggro). It can also happen within a single longer fight, where high-DPS abilities and phases with longer cooldowns alternating with slower phases with less damage output. In a group with meaningful interactions, this can be even more pronounced by cooldown pacing of all members of the groups, stacking them or at least keeping track of other member’s abilities.

Variation: The Romans knew it already: variatio delectat. Alternating melee mobs with casters, high damage dealers with healers, and so on, provides variation that can prevent dullness. In larger and longer fights this can appear as fight phases with different tactics, or with specialized roles for players that may even be rotated among them (e.g., an ability has to be interrupted or an item interacted with every 15 seconds, but doing so gives you a 60-second cooldown).

Now, I don’t think it’s required to have all these things at the same time, all the time. But in the absence of all of them, dullness can creep in. The type of “dynamic event”/”public quest”/Rift/Fate (is there a generally-understood umbrella term for those?) I’m thinking of has none of those three, more often than not. It does not have meaningful interaction, because everybody mashes buttons as fast as possible, without any regard to other players. Rhythm is invariably off. In larger groups in Rift, most public event monsters died before I could even finish a cast as a mage. In FFXIV, we had events with single monsters that didn’t do anything but hit like a wet towel, but had the HP of an oil tanker. The fact that they didn’t do anything but hit the player at the top of the aggro list also meant that there was no variation to the fight.

I’ve seen this happen too often with dynamic events, which is why I think most of them produce bad fights and nothing good enough to offset that. They often feel like a missed opportunity. Maybe there are design decisions or limitations that make it incredibly hard to make engaging events, but the current iteration stinks.

Force People to Read. Hilarity Ensues.

2013-07-15Final Fantasy XIV, General Game-related Blatheringflosch

Beta 3 for Final Fantasy XIV has ended. I’m working on an overview post that gives my opinions on the game, but there is one thing that I think deserves its own posts (if only because it’s too much of a detour in the larger post).

FFXIV has a dungeon finder. That I’m not a big fan of, but I guess it’s the evil we have to live with these days. What’s new is that, probably to prepare people for dungeon mechanics, the dungeon finder also provides a sort of “training dungeons” that are basically single rooms with a fight that has one educational objective: Pull single mobs or small groups from a room, handle adds that spawn during a boss fight, etc. A very good idea overall. I love it, more games should have it. The scenario I enjoyed most though was the “turtle fight”. The idea is that some rich eccentric guy’s “pet turtle” (which is about twice as large as a player character) has been kidnapped, and he wants it back. I enjoyed the scenario for two reasons: first, the fight was fairly complex for a level 15 challenge. It is ridiculously easy if you do it right (because mob strength is undertuned to make for a training experience with some leeway), but impossible if you do it wrong. It’s also not rocket science at all to do it right, and doesn’t rely on twitch muscles or the like. All that you need is to understand the simple mechanics and act according to them. The mechanics are:

The turtle needs to be tranquilized, but not killed. Killing it means failing the mission.
The turtle can be put to sleep by lighting a herbal pouch that is statically placed on the ground.
To light that pouch, you need to kill a fire elemental that spawns occasionally and drops some sort of lighter (because bringing your own source of fire would be too easy, I guess).
The herbal pouch will only produces fumes for a period after lighting it. After that, you will need to rinse and repeat the last step.
To make it go to sleep, the turtle needs to be brought to low health, and close to the fumes. (The herbs are a powerful turtle hypnotic, but do not affect people at all.)
The kidnappers are not happy about your trying to rescue the turtle, so they will heal it and attack you. Occasionally, additional mobs will spawn.
All of this is explained in the introductory text.

Exercise: name at least 5 things that can go wrong with a group that doesn’t read quest texts.

Online Friendships and Offline Anchors

2013-03-17General Game-related Blatheringflosch

MMOs and virtual worlds are a strange thing when it comes to social connections. We meet new people, we become friends, sometimes also outside of the game, and sometimes we even marry and have kids.

And then there are the friendships that never make the move out of the game. You might know where someone lives, you might know their first name, but that’s about it. No addresses, no fallback contact possibilities, no offline “anchor”. Are those friendships worth less? I don’t think so. They simply work as friendships, they don’t need other anchors. They come with a risk, though. Let me tell you a story, one that most of you could probably tell in a similar way, by just exchanging names, times, and places.

My first experience with WoW, I have said it before, was in 2005. I had the luck to immediately find a nice guild on the first try. I don’t even know whether I would have kept playing at all had this first guild been a bad choice. But we played together, we had fun together, we spent time on vent talking about all kinds of things. But except for “I’m the German guy who’s living in Japan at the moment”, we never progressed into personal information. If I knew people’s hometowns, that was much. For many of them, I never even knew their real names.

One of my best friends in that guild was a fellow hunter by the name of Zarica. When I had to temporarily retire from the class officer position to focus on exams, I was glad that it was him who took over. When I came back, we kinda did the job together. Zarica lived in a relatively small, relatively winter-sport-touristy town in the Canadian Rockies. I can’t remember for sure, but I think it was Banff. Back then, he worked full-time only during the winter season, and spent the summer working part-time and focusing on his hobbies (which, besides WoW, included things like photography).

At some point he announced that he would soon have to go on a hiatus. He was getting married, and needed to prepare. He said he’d return as soon as possible. You know how the story goes. He never did. The guild went belly up at some point, and the people scattered like dust in the wind.

Why am I writing about that now? This week, I am on a work trip for a couple of days. Just now, I am in Banff. If my memory serves me right, and he hasn’t moved, and a thousand other things that may have happened since then, chances are I am within 5 minutes of his home. We could sit in the same restaurant, stand at the same traffic light, walk past each other in the street.

And neither of us would ever know.

Of course, it can also go differently. On my way back home, I’ll visit another friend I met in WoW, and even though we haven’t played together in years, we’re still in contact. There is a point to be made for disclosure. If only to have a fallback way to contact people.

The Totalitarianism of Progress-Focused MMO Gaming

2012-10-18General Game-related Blatheringflosch

Rohan mused over the question of “optional” goals in MMOs yesterday, on the basis of how so many things in Pandaria are gated by daily limitations, and the feeling by many progress-focused players that there is too much that they have to do right now to stay competitive. He quotes himself from an earlier post of his:

Sometimes it seems like this genre has no concept of the term “optional”. Something is either absolutely necessary, or it is useless. There doesn’t seem to be any in-between.

This quote is very scary. This is in part because he is right. All too often the focus is on pure numbers and progress, and everything else is subordinate to that. Something that was added to the game either doesn’t help with progression, in which case it is considered useless, or it gives advantages in gear, enchants, consumables, etc., in which case it is considered mandatory to stay competitive. I will call this the “raider’s mindset” (and the people with that mindset “raiders”) because it is short and handy, even though you will only see this in a subset of raiders, and on the other hand also in non-raiders with a highly competitive mindset.

The other reason why it is scary is that the way Rohan puts it is eerily similar to Curzio Malaparte’s definition of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism is when everything not compulsory is forbidden.

Of course, it’s harder to flee a totalitarian regime than a raid group, and you (typically) don’t choose to live in a totalitarian state, but choose to play with a certain group, yadda yadda. Let’s discount this for the sake of this discussion (also, because it opens up a completely different can of worms when it comes to official pressure vs. peer pressure and such).

The question, though, is: is there a prevalent mindset in this “raider” group of MMO players that works almost like an internalized totalitarian game regime?

Any means that further the ends of progression, however small, become compulsory, not only to not let down your peers, but also because there’s a feeling that keeping up is necessary for your own sake, to feel like a worthwhile player. On the other hand, every other in-game activity will only be an afterthought, something to do in your “free time”. But, there’s the problem: Pandaria has, like all expansions, brought heaps of new content that contain these mandatory bits and pieces, and it seems Blizzard has upped the ante this time in what there is to do to stay competitive. When it is hard or impossible to complete all the compulsory tasks, everything not compulsory becomes in effect prohibited, because it takes up valuable time that should be used otherwise. Voilà, your internalized totalitarian game mini-regime: the game tells you what to do, and you do exactly that and only that.

The difference to a classic totalitarian regime becomes clear when it comes to the breaking point: I, like many people, at some point burned out and got disillusioned, even uninterested, in the raiding game. You then can say for yourself: “enough”, and stop. That obviously doesn’t work as well when borders are closed and passports hard to come by.

It’s strange, I still look back fondly on my hardcore raiding days. I miss them sometimes. I wonder whether it has something to do with exactly being told what to do, and just doing it, regardless of whether you like it or not; and being proud of that? Let’s hope not, because that would be a somewhat scary thought.

What I’m not playing: GW2

2012-08-22General Game-related BlatheringGuild Wars, Guild Wars 2, toxic fanboysflosch

This is the second of what I expect to be three posts about three games that I’m not playing, each for another reason.

Reading blogs at the moment, it seems everybody is preparing for the next big event this year. It feels a bit like being a child at the start of the big summer holidays. Everybody’s packing to leave for vacation. For some reason, I stay at home, though. It turned out that Greenland is all the rage this year, and I don’t like shivering in June, so I’d rather stay here anyway, on my own. Collecting keys for all the houses, so I can water the plants, feed the fish, empty the mailboxes, et cetera, until they’ll all be back and show me long slide shows of glaciers, or whatever there is to see on Greenland.

Getting off on the wrong foot

The first time I heard of Guild Wars was shortly after I started playing WoW in 2005. Some guild mates on Ventrilo talked about this game they enjoyed on the side. When I asked what it was about, they told me it was awesome because it was “all instances” and “totally PvP-focused!”.

I don’t think I ever lost interest in a game faster. “All instances” and “all PvP” thenceforth were burned into my brain as description of Guild Wars, and it was neatly filed under “games you don’t care for and are not interested in”. And let me tell you, once I decided something is not for me, I have an impressive ability to ignore it. I literally never so much as heard from Guild Wars again until a couple of months ago, when I started reading blogs that talked about it, and a successor.

The first thing I was surprised about was that the game still existed. The second thing was that, supposedly, it had become much more PvE-focused. The problem was that still, nothing that I read made me really yearn for the game. I had a lot of other games I enjoyed at that time. And let’s face it, it’s not a UO or EQ: games that feel I need to have tried out just because of their name and influence, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not.

Continuing on the wrong foot?

What I read about GW2 so far is the following: It will have Dynamic Events, just like Rift. Wasn’t a big fan of them there, either. Especially if you do them on your own because everybody else is in other areas. And I like somewhat empty areas, so it’s bound to happen to me in dynamic event games.

It will be the same “select monster, hit actions on your bar, loot” model that almost every other game has had in the last years. And don’t tell me about “dynamic dodging” and such, we’ve already had that couple of times, too (TERA and TSW are the ones just from this year that spring to mind). Now, being just like the others is not a fault. (I actually still like the target-and-use-abilities system.) It just means that you don’t set yourself apart in a positive way, either.

Finally, PvP. Yeah… well. I heard it’s mostly WvWvW. And the way I understood it, it will be a large battleground, WoW-style (as in AV 1.0, when battles could take days), capped at a certain number of people per side, to encourage “fair battles”.

I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t like fair PvP. Actually, I don’t like PvP much at all, but if it happens, I like it with 5:1 odds, preferably more. Why? Simple. I suck at PvP. I don’t win 1vs1. It’s one of the things EVE does right: you rarely fight at even odds. You fight when you think you outnumber or outgun your enemy. And you fight back when you think you have people ready to tilt the odds in your favor. It feels a lot more natural to me. Maybe it’s because I don’t like fighting other people much to start with. I’m more of a cooperative person. Add to that the fact that PvP seems to bring out the worst in people. So if I fight, I don’t fight for fun, but to win and get it over with. And I don’t care whether it’s fair or not.

Compelled to stay on the wrong foot

Also, there’s a certain… attitude to a very, VERY vocal minority among the soon-to-be GW2 players. I’ve seen rabid fanboyism before, but not at this scale: descending on every argument against their game. A game that, in their mind, will open the seventh seal, signal the second coming of Christ Almighty (minus those pesky riders), and deliver us all from the Evil that is every other game. But only for true believers, of course. If you dare question any of the dogmas, all you’ll get is a “shun the non-believer! shuuuuuuuun!“. If you’re lucky. If not, something like this happens. (From there on down, pretty much.)

Oh my. This is just… I’m at a loss for words. And all of this to a person who actually has preordered the game, so decided that it’s worth playing for him. The one thing we can all hope for is that those people will soon start playing their game, then promptly descend on the forums to spew all their hate towards the GW2 developers for developing what is only *gasp* a game! No game could seriously fulfill the inflated expectations by this point.

Will I ever get back on the other foot?

GW2 has one thing going for them: You buy the box, and from then on it’s F2P right out of the door. I will glance over the inevitable avalanche of posts about the game, starting from next week. If I like what I see there, I might pick it up later. That will have another huge advantage: the vast majority of the toxic fanboys that descend like locusts on blogs right now will have stopped playing by then. They’ll realize that, in the end GW2 is a game, not eternal salvation and deliverance from evil. It will probably make for a much better community and chat channels that you don’t have to leave immediately for fear of eye cancer, stomach ulcers, or fits of rage. I really feel for those who will have to wade through this in the coming weeks once the game goes live to enjoy the game they’re looking forward to. I hope all the nice bloggers will find some fun in the game, I really do! After all, it’s probably not a bad game. Just one that didn’t perk my interest when I heard of it, and then spoiled by the attitude of a minority that I think would make it impossible for me to enjoy the game at this point in time.

Alpha Weekend: City of Steam

2012-08-20General Game-related Blatheringalpha, City of Steam, testflosch

I’m by far not the first one to blog about this. In fact, at least Bhagpuss and Keen have participated in several of the alpha tests before. This weekend, they had a big one though, with everybody and their grandmother being able to procure alpha keys via helpful people who had been to the party before (a big thanks from me to Stubborn at Sheep The Diamond for providing me with a key; my grandmother passed on the chance, though).

I already knew that the game was browser-based, something I have a distinct dislike for. There are several reasons, none of them well-founded, but you know how it goes with prejudices; they don’t need foundation, just self-reinforcement. One sign that I had never touched these before was that I actually had to install the Unity3D browser plugin first. The rest of the setup, however, went very smoothly. I entered my alpha key, created an account, logged in and… whoops, this is already the game? You mean, it already loaded? That was fast.

Let me say: for a browser game and that little loading time, the game intro looked very impressive. That impression stayed with me for the rest of my test. Of course, you cannot compare City of Steam with dedicated game engines with gigabytes of local assets. But I was still impressed by the visual quality. Loading screens between zones rarely kept me for longer than 5-10 seconds, and only once or twice did I have problems interacting with objects or NPCs right after a zone change; canceling and retrying solved this consistently.

One big disadvantage of being a browser game is that it doesn’t have a proper screenshot button. I’m already very bad at remembering to make screenshots, but if doing one requires me to press PrintScreen, alt-tab out, paste into IrfanView, and save into a file… well, I ended up with 2 screenshots, neither of which showed the complete screen. Both of them where in “interaction” or “talking” mode, in which the screen gets letterboxed so you can choose answers over a black background:

Or, in this case, can’t choose anything because I ran into the “Loading…” bug. As I said, though, on the second try talking to her a second later, it worked fine.

For more (and better) pictures, I suggest you visit Bhagpuss, who also had more time to focus on the specific aspect of the game’s vendor economy in the game, or Azuriel, who has a video and a short interview.

Sadly, I had little time on the weekend, so I only could give the game a test drive of about 2 hours. I rolled a female Hobbe warder, because, you know, orc girls! In plate! And the Hobbe looked most lean and mean of the bunch of no less than three greenskin races (Hobbe, Orc, and Goblin). I decided to ignore the plate tank top; at least it wasn’t a bikini.

It took me a bit to get used to the controls. Movement and battle is very similar to Diablo and its clones, but you have a free-moving camera, which, as opposed to every other game I’ve played recently, is moved by holding down your right mouse key. You (left) click to move (though you can also use WASD), and click to attack (though you can also use Q), and have a limited amount of abilities that you can assign to number keys. Enemies die, lots of stuff falls to the ground, and you click to pick it up. One quirk is that you have a choice between different attack modes. The warder, for example, can use a 2h sword stance, a dual-wielding stance, and sword-and-board. I guess they form different points on the scale between offensive and defensive, but I couldn’t figure this out completely during the test. One of the problems of the alpha is that the tutorial is still rudimentary. It is there, though, more than you can say of some other games that are much farther into their development.

When it comes to story and quests, though, City of Steam falls squarely into MMO territory, and the style reminds me most of a crossover between DDO and Allods. Main quests, side quests, exploration quests, all there. Maps are provided, but not very useful, because they’re too small; on the other hand, for most quest objectives, you can select a “satnav” mode which will lead you to your target. It works well for the most part, but every now and then, gets stuck and required you to backtrack to a certain point before it works again.

Now, remember that when I say things like “the maps are too small” or “the satnav is buggy” that this is still an alpha. These are mostly small things that could easily be fixed, and chances are, many of them will. At the core, I see promise as far as game play and story goes. I have two personal problems with the game, however: 1) I still don’t like the browser-based thing, even though it works very well and I understand where they come from and that it might be a lot easier and less infrastructure-heavy, and 2) I’m not a huge fan of steampunk. If these are no problems for you, you definitely should keep eyes on that game though; I will, even though these might make it hard for me to enjoy the game long-term.

Finally, there’s another very good point that Azuriel makes in the above-linked post (and that I already had thought about, but he was faster at posting it!): These smaller-scale games that don’t cost hundreds of millions to produce might actually be the future for the MMO genre. They can work without immense numbers of players, because their monthly expenses are lower, too. Maybe we’ll see the occasional blockbuster MMO again, but it feels like a very risky endeavor at the moment. Smaller games that can work with limited layer numbers can make tailor-made worlds the way they prefer, without having to cater to a least common denominator to catch lots of people. If that should happen, I’ll look at it with a laughing and a weeping eye. I will miss the vastness, the polish, the work that only an army of game and graphic designers can do; but I’ll look forward to closer, more tight-knit and friendly communities and probably more mingling again between the developers and their players, and see what comes out of that.

Another one bites the F2P bullet

2012-08-02General Game-related Blatheringfree-to-play, SW:TORflosch

Welcome again to Random Waypoint, home of cobbled-together overused stereotypical expressions.

In case you’re living under a rock, or in the Outback of Australia, where I will go to for a week soon, driving 2000km through nothingness, all Easy Rider and such – I bet that will be awesome… Where was I? Oh, right. If you’re living far away from all civilization, and by some freak accident, your only tether to The World(tm) (not The Secret One) is this blog, let me tell you: SW:TOR will be going free-to-play at some point in the near future.

Oh, the sadness! The told-you-so! The bitterness! The rationalizations!

Oh well.

What? How I feel about it? Hm. Hmmm. I guess a bit smug? But only a bit, because I never cared much about the game. The smugness comes from the perceived attitude by Bioware and EA to do the best thing since sliced bread, Azeroth style. Here was the savior, riding on the white horse (or at the very least an AT-AT) of the bestest intellectual property (a term that I dislike to start with) ever conceived. I mean, their IP has princesses, and robots, and magic, and swashbuckling smugglers who might or might not shoot first. Though it always felt a bit silly to me. (As opposed to Star Trek, which I always found to be very silly with all the techno-babble and planet of the week, but at least they had Patrick Fucking Stewart. Can’t argue with an actor that actually knows Shakespeare. Not personally, though. Or maybe? Who knows? I don’t.) Problem is: EA is known for producing terrible games out of IPs. The whole EA Sports lineup is basically the same boring heap of crap released every single year, just with new names on the rosters. At least it was during the time I actually tried them out, before I swore in disgust never ever to touch one of these again.

That is not to say SW:TOR is a horrible, horrible game. I guess it’s Bioware’s work that saves it from that fate. It actually had a nice idea, combining Bioware’s story-driven solo RPGs with an MMO setting. It seems that didn’t work out so well, though. At least for me, it didn’t. And neither for another 75% of their player base. I’ll assume that many of them did not reach end game and got bored there, although there are no numbers on that. It is much more likely, though, that many of them stopped playing while they were still supposed to be engrossed in their story. I’ve been trying to figure out why exactly that happened to me, too.

It came at a bad time for me

This is probably the most flattering reason I can give: It was just not to be. In late November, I picked up Oblivion on a Steam sale. During the Beta weekends, I was in the land of my dreams. And after Christmas, I was busy playing Mass Effect 1 and 2. So I was quite distracted, and actually playing other Bioware games during the first month after release. Later on I picked up the game on sale, but by that time I had been accepted into EVE University, and that was that. (You might have noticed I never wrote about the game again after my “I bought it” post.)

That reason is a bit of a cop-out, though. Of course, it was some rough sailing, but a really good game would have prevailed and come out the winner. It turned out to be Batman in the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny: hanging on for some time, but in the end crushed by Chuck Norris. OK, maybe in this case it wasn’t Chuck Norris but rather EVE Online, but hey, Chuck Norris sounds more flattering, right?

The graphics engine sucked

That’s a technical irk I had with the game. The graphics really weren’t much to phone home about, and the game still made my graphics card sounds as if my computer was going to lift off any minute, especially during the conversation scenes. Maybe it was an optimization problem and has gotten better now, who knows. I’m not sure whether the game uses the same engine as RIFT, but it had the same weird “aura” effects around targeted enemies and flora in some areas. I’m not a big fan of that.

Graphics like this should not have taxed my graphics card as much as they did. Incidentally, that is the only screenshot I made during the time I played the game… so I couldn’t even show you a cut scene one that made it go completely crazy.

The storytelling is actually not that good

That might be a controversial opinion, but I realized that the main selling point of the game, the class-specific story lines, didn’t grab me the way they were intended to. One of the reasons for that might be that I never was a big Star Wars fan. When I was 13, and our always-behind-the-technical-curve family finally got a VCR, I watched the movies a couple of times and liked them, sure. But they never grabbed me the way movies like Dune did around that time (and let me tell you, a LOT of people hate Dune for being a David Lynch style movie). So the “OMG but it’s Star Wars” selling point just never was one for me.

The story is also spread quite thin in some areas. (And early on to boot, because that’s the only part of the game I’ve seen.) A lot of the “kill 10 rats” and “collect 20 rat droppings” quests were uninspiring, and the full voice-overs helped surprisingly little with that. I expected that it would help form a bond to the quest givers, but at least the way it’s set up, I still don’t care about that pixel guy or gal I will interact with exactly twice in my character’s life. The class story line seemed ok, but I rarely felt really captivated. At times, it just dawdled along.

Finally, the game made me realize that I don’t even like the Bioware implementation of “meaningful choices” all that much. I do like the choice; but the choice is limited much more than I would have expected by the conversation options that you are given. I lost count of how often I chose an option, only to realize that my character would say it in a completely different tone than I intended, or even completely different words, which undermined my choices. I never encountered a surprise BSOCK, but I’m sure I would’ve stumbled into one had I played for long enough. There was choice, but frighteningly often, it was not meaningful: all I could do was choose between several options without any real knowledge about what each option was.

In that respect, the strange implementation of voice-overs in The Secret World feels more satisfying. You are talked to, but never say a word yourself. That way, at least your character cannot say anything unintended, and you have full freedom to project your own thoughts into the knowing silence of your character.

Fake “languages” are horrible

I just have to say this again, because it annoys me so much. Wilhelm talked about how point-blank blaster shootouts were a deal breaker for him. For me, it was the alien languages that just consisted of some canned sound bites repeated ad nauseam. Come to think of it, that was already one of my gripes with the movies. In a game that focuses so much on storytelling via audio, I could not ignore it enough to not be annoyed.

Will I play for free?

Good question. I think I’ll have to find out whether the couple of friends who went to play SW:TOR are still playing. That might lure me back. Then again, it’s not like I didn’t play with them until now because I was too stingy to pay 15 Euros a month. I didn’t play with them because I didn’t enjoy the game enough. So, I might not delete SW:TOR from my disk yet, and might check out the game from time to time; maybe depending on the specifics of the F2P implementation even eventually finish a story line. But I wouldn’t bet on it. I’m more motivated to return to LotRO at the moment. At least that’s a setting I care about. And it has real fictional languages to boot.