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.

A Dearth Of Pants

2012-08-19The Secret Worldcosmetic gear, hats, pantsflosch

The Secret World is, overall, doing a splendid job with clothing so far. All of the stat-bearing items you can equip are invisible trinkets, except for your weapons. Your appearance is solely decided by what you pick out of your character’s wardrobe. Of course, that freedom does lead to the occasional… ahem… fashion accident:

Despite appearance to the contrary, “XxXLegolarthasXxX” is not a hooker.

Note the juxtaposition: at the very moment I saw this individual with, let’s say, questionable choice of what to wear (or rather, what not to wear), another player in the chat box quotes Eddie Izzard. It’s not all doom and gloom!

This freedom has led to a lot of experimentation on my behalf.

For your run-of-the-mill zombie killing, I prefer a casual approach that emphasizes comfort and ease of movement over etiquette.

For some London strolling or to enter the exclusive Temple’s Club, something a bit sophisticated is in order. But not too dull, either.

If in doubt, I can always go with the dress uniform.

And finally, if I feel like it, there’s of course always plain silliness.

However, I notice that some options are woefully underrepresented. I’m at last done with Solomon Island, and my next area of operations will be Egypt. Naturally, I want some apparel that will fit the area’s climate. My first idea was to dress light. Above the waist, this is not a problem: there are enough options of T-shirts and tank tops available for both genders to equip all cast AND extras of Gone With The Wind with them. Not that you would want to do that. That would be silly. Though the mental image is amusing. There are also enough choices of jeans and cargo pants to go with the tops.

I will NOT wear these.

But when it comes to shorter types of trousers? You’re out of luck. There are exactly two choices for male characters at the moment, and one of them looks like it was conserved in time and last worn at a punk concert in the 80ies. And no pants is no option (literally, there is no in-game option to not wear any). So maybe I should go the other direction and shield myself from the sun. After all, full-length pants are in ample supply.

However, I run into another problem then. There are no brimmed hats in the game at the moment! I can get baseball caps, military caps, even something that remotely looks like a bandana… but no Stetsons, no Bowlers, no Panamas, no Homburgers. Shouldn’t London have its fair share of hatters? Worst of all, though, not even pith helmets! How can a proper, self-respecting gentleman go to Africa without a pith helmet? Funcom, this is something you clearly need to work on.

So… It’s Kung Fu Panda After All?

2012-08-17World of Warcraftexpansion, pandas, Pleasure Not Doing Business With Youflosch

Horde and Alliance fight each other. But worry not, they will band together against the common evil… the Pandas which will destroy them all. But hold on, Pandas are cute, so we are evil? I’m confused. Blizzaaaaaaard! Don’t do that to me! You know, your game should be accessible, not make me think and fail at it!

Anyway. Let me compose myself.

Unfortunate Focus

Going by the news, one of the topics of the next expansion supposedly is broader focus. Diversification. Alternate ways of advancement. I would’ve expected to see this focus on less focus in the trailer. Instead in the trailer for Mists of Pandaria, you see mists, and you see a panda. (I didn’t see a “ria”, but that might be because I don’t know what that is.) That’s about as much focus as you can put on one thing. It’s basically the title of the expansion in video form. The strong focus on one thing, the Big Bad at the end, was in line with the previous expansions, but that also means that by extrapolation, Mr. Panda suddenly gets cast into this weird role as big-bad-but-wait-not-really.

Unfortunate Reference

When I say, “it’s Kung Fu Panda after all”, that is not only because kung fu and pandas is all we really see in the trailer, except for the stock Horde and Alliance poster children. As an aside, why is none of them female? Maybe I shouldn’t ask, because all we’d get is a scantily clad woman with clothes ripped off in strategic places from her unfortunate boating accident. (Also, I guess she wouldn’t fit in, because women obviously can’t wear real weapons, so she would have to be a mage, like all important human women in MMOs always are, and how would a Kung Fu Panda be able to beat a mage? ) Note: WoW needs more female orcs! Rawr! In your face!

No, the reason I saw Kung Fu Panda in that trailer was a very specific scene. Remember the scene where unnamed Panda #1 returns the decorative headpiece to its original place… then realizes it’s slightly askew and adjusts it with his staff? Here.

The movement, the sound effects, the timing, the comical effect… I don’t know whether I’m imagining it, but this felt so evocative of Kung Fu Panda. Now, don’t get me wrong, Kung Fu Panda is an enjoyable movie. It just doesn’t seem to fit with the “even more inter-faction war” vibe that I heard Blizzard was trying to push. Instead of downplaying the Kung Fu Panda angle with “but there’s so many more cool things waiting!”, they embrace it.

Unfortunate Use of Rhetorical Device

The first statement by Mr. Panda was that the question “why do we fight?” is a stupid one. He then proceeds to smack the previously brawling human and orc until they band up, then smacks them a bit more, then stops. Then we realize it seems the question actually might be “why do we fight?” after all, because that is what we’re given the answer to. Huh? Is it OK to be confused by that? Maybe Mr. Panda had a bit too much to drink. The answer he gives is “to protect home and family and blabla something harmony”. Well, that’s nice, I guess. I assume that is also the answer to the “real question”, as Mr. Panda puts it, that he then rhetorically asks: “what is worth fighting for?” That must be the reason why six weeks from now, all those Pandas will randomly choose either Horde or Alliance as faction, so they can proceed to smash each other’s heads in. Wait, what? That doesn’t make any sense in light of that trailer! The sad thing is, this trailer projects a relationship between the factions that I would have enjoyed a lot more than what we will get. The pandas stay together, the Horde and Alliance band up, and all need to go after the Big Bads.

Unfortunate Target Group

Well, at least for me, in a sense. Because I’m not part of it. (Whether that’s unfortunate or not might be up for debate.) I knew that beforehand. I actually watched the trailer with very low hopes. That, funny enough, often works for me like a reverse prejudice: because I go in with low hopes, there’s a decent chance I might be pleasantly surprised because I’m at least not totally disappointed. Sadly, it didn’t work this time.

Oh well. There’s other games to play. I might check out MoP once it’s in the virtual bargain bin, just for the hell of it.

Why Faction-Based PvP?

2012-08-16Rift, The Secret Worldbattlegrounds, cross faction, PvPflosch

For a long time, but especially since the success of WoW, MMOs have been implicitly expected to bring a portfolio of activities:

Quest-based leveling content (preferably soloable, at least the vast majority)
End-game content based on small and large groups (dungeons and raids for gear progression)
Player-vs-Player combat (preferably between factions that are decided by your initial racial choice)

Let’s focus on the last point today. Faction-based PvP always seemed restricting and arbitrary to me, especially because it artificially splits a game’s player base, which for all except the really large ones is a problem. There are different ways to implement this, ranging from a largely cooperative game whose players only fight against each other in designated PvP areas, but otherwise are free to play together, from completely segregated communities that can never interact.

Where does it come from?

I don’t know which MMO first came up with faction-based PvP (I’ve not played the really old ones), but it might have been Dark Age of Camelot. Older ones had, at least initially, either Free-for-all “gank-style” PvP (Ultima Online) or no PvP at all (Everquest), but neither had fixed factions. I honestly can’t remember how it worked in UO, but EQ, if I remember correctly, had you start being loved by some and hated by other NPC factions, based on your initial racial and class choice. However, you were free to work on all of them to improve your reputation, and to group with other players regardless of standings.

I’m not a big fan of faction-based PvP. Not only because of the mentioned split in the player base that at least some games avert, but also because I like to play with people, not against them, and the artificial animosities between factions both amuse and annoy me. (I think that’s one of the reasons why Cataclysm was such a letdown for me.) Of course, you don’t need game-provided factions. Just go and listen to “official” statements by leaders of EVE alliances, and how they try to incite their members to fight against their horribly evil, incompetent enemies of the month, and you see that you don’t necessarily need the game to provide factions.

Let’s look at two examples: Rift, because it’s all in the news with their coming change to faction mechanics; and The Secret World, because it’s the original reason I started to write this post, before it grew from a funny aside, filler post, into something with at least slightly more substance.

Rift

Pick one, fight, call it a day. We don’t care what faction you come from.

Rift seems to be the first of the strict faction-based games that so far neither allowed grouping nor guilding or visiting the “enemy” cities, that gets a clue. As far as I understand it, the “Conquest” mechanic introduces a transient, instant choice between three new factions every time you sign up for a PvP battle. I just assume that each faction will have different rewards, to entice people to sign up for one or the other, but still make sure that people have a reason to choose each of them (so there won’t be a player bottleneck by players shunning one faction), and it doesn’t end up with “all mages go ram, all rogues go raven”. Outside of PvP, factions will pretty much disappear.

The funny thing is that the implementation, but especially the lore reasoning, is almost exactly what I had always wished to happen in WoW: the Horde and Alliance splintering over their diverging goals, and giving the player to choice of staying with them, or joining common causes such as the Argent Dawn or the Cenarion Circle. Well, not quite like Rift, more like a crossover between Rift and the EQ way, but still. If I just could get into the world of Rift, I might actually be really happy with the game! Alas.

The Secret World

The Secret World has three factions, of which you choose one at character creation, and which you can never change. On the other hand, factions don’t restrict you much at all. All players share the same zones, you can group up for quests and dungeons, you have common chat channels (though each faction also has their own “private” channel), so that’s fine. And, with the slightly worrying player numbers, definitely a good decision in hindsight, if only for that.

Lore-wise, the factions do fight each other, but it’s more of a political scheming and occasional assassination thing. Each group looks down on the others, but fighting is stipulated by rules that are watched over by the inter-faction Council of Venice. And now that all hell has broken loose (quite literally) in the Real World, the fighting in The Secret World seems to have stopped almost completely to focus on the common threats. Also, the whole “immortalized by spirit bees” thing makes all sorts of killing annoyingly ineffectual anyway.

TSW does have battlegrounds, though. Which makes you wonder what the point is. Thankfully, there is a tongue-in-cheek in-game explanation for this. In the beautifully posh (and fitting for such a most superior organization) Templar’s Club, you meet the Stuart sisters, whose revealing costumes belie their sharp tongues and (at least for one of them) wit, talking to the librarian Gladstone, something of a crossover between Timothy Leary and Erich von Däniken. The topics you can interview them on almost all end in hilarity, but there is one that specifically lampshades PvP and battlegrounds. I found it funny enough that it fraps’ed it, and I’ll end my post with it:

Direct link for feed readers with embed problems. (edit: if you see a video that obviously is not a TSW ingame video, please use the direct link. It seems something wonky is going on with the wordpresss/youtube integration, and it sometimes shows videos from previous posts instead of the correct one.)

This, in one minute, covers everything I love about the Templars: posh locations, slightly snooty behavior and sharp tongues, rooted in history (note them mentioning The Great Game!), and back in time after a day’s work to plush upholstery, Pimm’s, and canapés!

I’m sorry for the bad video quality. It’s the first time I ever uploaded a video to youtube, and it seems I did something wrong. The video looked reasonably good in the humongous fraps output, and pretty much the same after I encoded it with H.264 to 1% of its size, but after I uploaded it, youtube seems to have reencoded it, and now it’s all blocky. But the audio is fine, and that’s what it’s all about in that video anyway.

Trion Takes Another Lesson From The Best-In-Class

2012-08-15Riftflosch

As the first Blizzard Annual Pass Holders are closing in on the end of their one-year contract, another pupil in the class of MMO companies steps up their game. The perennial eager beaver takes another lesson from the star pupil’s book and creates its own one-year bundle:

Get all these things for FREE* (*if you give us money)

Wilhelm had the dollar price, but naturally, I wanted to find out what that costs in our money.

That turned out to be harder than expected. I first had to log in. Then realized that, in fact, I could not log in, because I had to “upgrade my security” by replying to a mail, then creating a new password, yadda yadda. Did I miss something? Did Trion also get hacked some time in the last 12 months? Also, can somebody PLEASE tell game companies that so-called “security questions” are bogus, pseudo-security snake oil? Please Trion, go and copy someone on that topic who understands security. Those questions also don’t get better the more obscure they become. Hint: if half of them don’t even apply to me, and the other half is obscure enough that I would have a hard time remembering them myself, don’t be surprised if I find ways to subvert them.

What the…? Yes, of course, my secret stage name is Lassie Main Street. Or something. Who comes up with these questions?

My first reaction: Trion, always copying, sometimes doing things better. Not sure this is one of these occasions.

My second reaction: that’s still quite pricey!

My third reaction: That is still tempting, though. So much money saved! And saving money is good, right?

My fourth reaction: Wait. How much Rift have you played in the last year? Yeah, not so much. How often have you logged in to at least try the 1-20 leveling range? Thought so.

My fifth reaction: Alright then, let’s get down to the hard money. How long would I have to play to get a good deal out of this? This is complicated by the fact that I can’t find hard numbers on the price tag for the expansion in retail. But looking at prices for other games’ expansions, it can’t be more than 40€. That leaves 67.88€ for subscriptions. Let’s have a look at Rift’s current subscription options:

It’s not 100% clear how the gear rewards for longer subscriptions will work with the Storm Chaser offer, whether you will still get them or not. Let’s just ignore them.

So 6 months cost 59.94€, which, even with the assumed expansion price on top, is still cheaper. At 7 months, you get into the area where the offer might be worth it, though depending on the box price, it might take you until month 8 to see profit. This especially if you might buy the expansion a bit after release, after it gets cheaper. And on top, “real” economists would argue that you also lose the interest on the money that you spend today instead of at a later point.

For me, that means it’s probably not worth it. I might play Rift again at a later point, but I don’t have plans for the immediate future. Unless TSW tanks and EVE gets boring, in which case I’d reconsider. But it’s a gamble, and no game has caught me for more than 6 months at a time in the last year or so.

I wonder how this offer will play out for Trion. I heard a lot of people who admitted that, in the end, they lost the Blizzard Annual Pass gamble. Of course, the situation here is a bit different, in that you get something for the game you play already anyway, instead of a completely different game, and the offer will cover a time where there is a lot of content available (by virtue of the expansion), instead of a year devoid of almost any content updates. So in that respect, it looks like a better offer than the Blizzard one. Still, I wonder whether some people might be more cautious this time around?

What exactly is the problem with Blue Mountain?

2012-08-12The Secret Worldflosch

I finally reached Blue Mountain yesterday. I’ve taken my sweet time in The Secret World, using a pattern in the first two zones of “run every mission once, then do the dungeon, then run a bunch of missions again, and a couple even a third time, plus a second dungeon run”. Now I’m in the worst zone of them all, according to many people, among them Bhagpuss and Syp.

It’s just that I can’t agree.

To me, starting out in Savage Coast was painful. I died so often on the first missions, I was getting genuinely annoyed. The missions around the Overlook Motel were bad, and the League of Monster Slayers one was downright painful, with the horrible, horrible Ak’abs and their pathologically social behavior of coming to help their mate from across half the map, just to kill me. In comparison, Blue Mountain is cake so far. Granted, I’ve only done the Sasquatches, the Grunt camp, and the mansion. Maybe the difficulty and annoyance magically ramps up afterwards. Maybe my build just happens to be weak in Savage Coast, and strong in Blue Mountain. Maybe it’s just that I spent what felt like a lot of time in the previous two zones. I actually did my Jambala Special Assignment mission before I moved out of Savage Coast.

But even the Ak’abs feel much more considerate in Blue Mountain, graciously letting me kill them without calling every relative for help down to their third cousins twice removed.

Also, Funcom got some massive bonus points for this:

OMG, it’s my favorite band’s logo! Though very… colorful. Also, a bit ahead of its time. That flashback scene takes place in 1966, and Blue Öyster Cult published their first album in 1972. But maybe Sandy Pearlman was a survivor of that artist’s colony?

My main problem with the game right now is actually that I can’t figure out what to spend AP and SP on. I’ve focused on blood magic so far, with a small amount of pistols, just because I like the combination style-wise. I branched out into fists when I came close to the maximum allowed backlog of 175 AP, simply for Bloodsport, only to realize that I didn’t like it. When I reached 170 again, I bought all of the inner wheel blade skills, with the idea that I might go back and try tanking in the first two dungeons. I’m still completely clueless on how to design a good deck though. I know in theory you should try and figure out how to exploit certain one of the four major debuffs (afflicted, impaired, weakened, and hindered) , or of the attack type, but I still feel pretty lost and mostly just choose stuff based on what sounds nice. On the other hand, I always try to save up points until I’m close to the allowed cap, just in case I suddenly get a clue.

Funcom in trouble?

2012-08-11The Secret Worldflosch

Bhagpuss found an interesting tidbit of news on the Funcom site. Not good news. Apparently, they’re in a bit of a pickle, financially. They’re not broke by any stretch of imagination, but it seems they’ve gotten into the investor trap of “yes, you’re making money, but I expected you to make much more money, so you suck!”.

It would be a real shame if that had effects that would, for example, impede the development and update cycle of The Secret World. In fact, it would be extremely sad. Funcom seems to be a company that has improved with every MMO they published (granted, it could only get better from their initial game’s worst launch in history), and at least from blog postings, you get an almost overwhelmingly positive vibe. Of course, there are people who don’t like the game, and that’s fine. But I didn’t expect the overall positive reception.

In fact, just last week, I thought about how EA/Bioware with SW:TOR and Funcom with TSW were almost antitheses to each other. Here, the game that was hyped for years and years, produced with an immense amount of money, a popular IP, and inflated expectations; and in the end, failing those for many. There, a game by a company that was not exactly known for producing the best games in the world, produced almost in obscurity for much of its development cycle, in a self-created scenario that wasn’t supported by an expensive IP, and starting to the wariness of many people. I can’t count the number of posts I read on blogs that said “I wanted to skip it, it’s Funcom after all, and I didn’t want to touch their games with a 10 feet pole any more, but then I tried, and boy, am I having fun”! (Case in point: Kadomi. Hi there! Good to see you writing again!)

Let’s just hope that the outcome won’t be the same for both, that in the one case the hype and its failure to live up to it is its undoing, and in the other case the low expectations and wariness of customers.

I really want TSW to succeed. It’s earned its right to succeed, and it shows that Funcom seems to be a company able of learning, which in and of itself is rare enough that it should be rewarded, not punished. Plus, I am having so much fun in the game now! It would be sad to see Funcom fail 100 meters before the finish.

Overlook Motel, Solomon Island: the coziest place off the New England coast

2012-08-07The Secret Worldin character, Templarsflosch

I’m not very good at writing diaries. I tried a couple of times as a kid, but it never progressed far. I think I managed to fit five years of entries into a single notebook, just a couple of them a year. The thing fit some poems and aborted writing attempts, too. The stuff you do when you’re 15. I started again when this weirdest of all journeys started last month. But then, I was given the instructions to come to London, and when I packed for the Eurostar, I packed lightly and forgot the damn thing at home.

No, I’ve always been more one to write in hindsight. So now that I’m sitting here at the Overlook Motel, zombies, ocean beasts, and the minions of hell raging outside… what better time to recap the recent events, and put it all into perspective to my own story?

My name is Anselm Arenberg. “Anselm” means “under the protection of the gods”, but there also was a famous theologian and scholastic by that name. Guess my parents wanted to make sure to cover all bases when they gave me that name. The Arenbergs were a famous and reasonably powerful House of the Old German Empire. You know, not the one with those Prussian cretins, the real one, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Voltaire joked that in the end, it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. But let him talk, what did he know? Lived at the miserable Frederick of Prussia’s court for a couple of years, must’ve gone to his head. In his defense, he returned to France in anger after the two had a fallout.

As I said, House Arenberg was reasonably powerful. We rarely were the focal point of politics, but that made our life a lot easier. What counted was that we reigned over a small area, but always in our own name. In our area, we were as powerful as the kings of France and England. Nobody stood between us and the Emperor. When we wanted to be heard, we would be heard. It is not quite clear when our family rose to prominence, but by the High Middle Ages, we held several territories in the western parts of Germany. Presumably sent one or two members on crusades, too, though not on the most successful ones. Such is life. Story I was told as a kid said one of us was in the entourage of King Barbarossa on the Third Crusade, was one of the last men that saw him alive before he drowned. Stood on the bridge when the king got impatient, rode through the Saleph river, and was caught by a wave in his heavy armor. Moral of the story: just because fate has chosen you for a position as a leader, never overestimate it. Not everybody and everything will bow to you. Maybe that attitude was one of the reasons we never had a lot of problems in our territories. Great power, great responsibility, and all that.

Anyway, at some point, we seem to have been considered famous, stable, and noble enough to be approached by the Templars, as they were known. How they tie in with the Knights Templar that were disbanded by Philip IV (technically by Pope Clement V, but he was conveniently kept in his Babylonian captivity in Avignon), and when exactly we were approached, I haven’t been able to find out yet. The Templar archives are still off-limits to me, and parts of our family’s archives were lost in a fire in 1698, so I can only guess that the connection must have already been established by then. Maybe we were approached when we were raised from counts to dukes, maybe it even was part of a deal: More prominence and precedence in the empire, and in return one of your non-heir children will always be in the ranks. It wasn’t all that bad a deal, it seems. Some of my ancestors were put on church positions that at times were little more than a sinecure; I can just assume that was part of their facade.

Of course, all that worldly power ended around 1800. First, Napoleon came and annexed our possession left of the Rhine. We got compensated with other areas, but you can’t create land out of thin air. The whole German Mediation was a big farce, a mixture of annexation and charity for those who had lost their lands to the French. It didn’t help anyway, when Napoleon pressed further, we lost our new, alien lands, too. And then when he was defeated, the bloody Prussians annexed it. Always blowing their big German horn, but nothing but thieves, all of them. What’s left today is a title in the Belgian peerage from one of our smaller former possession in the area. And, of course, our connection to the Templars. Just because we’re no rulers any more doesn’t mean they lost interest. In their eyes, we’re obviously still prime material.

They told me to pack light, casual, and comfortable. So I did.

When I reached London, I was picked up at St. Pancras Station by a guy called Gabriel Ritter. He’s from a landed gentry line somewhere in Bavaria. His family has been part of the most active branch of the Templars as “Schattenjäger” for a few generations, fighting lesser evils like werewolves. He’s old enough now to be semi-retired, though, with a desk job at the central bureaucracy. He gave me a short rundown of the most vital rules, and informed me of my new name within the order. From now on, in internal communications, I will go by the name of Tabascun. Those names are family-bound and inherited, and mine has been passed on from my uncle.

Come to think of it, great-uncle Phillip always entertained us with these magic tricks. He loved stage magicians, was one of his hobbies. When we visited him, he always performed tricks for us. He even let us in on some of the secrets, but the most spectacular ones, he kept to himself. Maybe they weren’t much of a trick at all. After the whole bees thing, I’m starting to wonder how much of it was real magic. Gabriel told me that only Jurors and higher ranks gain unlimited access to the Templar archives. This is my goal, I want to see just how deep we’ve been involved, and for how long.

One thing I’m pretty sure of, though: uncle Phillip never had to deal with the kind of stuff I have to. All those living dead and things. Can’t imagine that. Maybe he did all those secret handshake thingies, maybe they had some clandestine orgies with lots of wine and women and sacred rites, but I can’t believe he’s ever stood face to face with a drowned returned corpse. The smell is the worst. You’d think when they started living again, they would have stopped rotting. Maybe they did, and it’s just that the moving makes them disperse the smell everywhere. When it comes to that, I prefer the demons. With them, it’s mostly pumice with just a hint of sulphur. Thankfully, neither type likes blood magic, which is what the bees seemed to have chosen for me. Think uncle Phillip was more of an elementalist; then again, I was told your talents progress slowly and can branch out, so one day I might be able to light candles from afar for some nephews, too. Sure would beat sitting in this godforsaken place rambling on some paper with an “Overlook Motel, Solomon Island: the coziest place off the New England coast” letterhead printed on it while all hell breaks loose outside, quite literally.

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.