Picture Post: Khazad-dûm, at last!

2012-02-13Lord of the Rings Onlineflosch

Last time around, we saw Hiltibrant exploring Goblin-town. Before and after that, I’ve been busy. I progressed through the epic quest line, tried to kill the king of Angmar, but failed miserably.

Aragorn wasn’t too devastated though, and I continued, until I hit the taxi books (Volume 1, Books 9 and 10), which can be summarized as follows: “Dear adventurer, after your great deeds here in Angmar, we decided only the most prestigious and important tasks should be handled by you personally. That’s why I’ll send you to Bree, the Lone-Lands, and Esteldín, to fetch some information. And when you get back, I’ll send you to Evendim, where you’ll have to transport despatches between Tinnudir and Annúminas roughly seventeen hundred times, with a short trip to Rivendell for good measure.” At that point, I made a rude gesture to all those smelly Rangers behind their backs and decided it was time to go to Moria.

But first things first. I had heard that you can’t ride horses or ponies in Moria. Luckily, I had invested some time into killing evil dwarves, which made the dwarves of Thorin’s Hall so happy that they graciously allowed me to buy one of their riding goats… for a hefty price, of course. Damn those greedy dwarves. To be honest, the goat looks a bit strange, especially when you have to look at its weirdly wobbling behind for hours. *ahem* But it’s functional, so I won’t complain.

As I said before, I love the world Turbine designed for LotRO. Or rather, the world was already there, but the way they made it looks for the game. So I decided to get used to the goat, and to not use any fast travel skills. Instead I rode all the way from Thorin’s Hall, through Ered Luin, the Shire, Bree-Land, the Lone Lands, the Trollshaws, and Eregion, to the gates of Moria. I made a lot of screenshots to show the beautiful landscape, even though the weather wasn’t the best with mostly overcast and some rain. Since there are a lot of pictures after this point, I’ll hide them behind the cut.
Continue reading Picture Post: Khazad-dûm, at last! →

How to Preserve Games as Cultural Assets

2012-02-09General Game-related Blatheringculture, preservation, transienceflosch

Zubon from Kill Ten Rats is getting all existential today:

And, behind the veil, this is our MMO gaming world. You will come and go, and nothing you do will have mattered except to the people who experienced it.

As some people have already pointed out in that post’s comments, you will arrive at this point of transience with everything you do, and with life itself, if you zoom out far enough, save for the minimal amount of people who will be remembered for exactly one thing they did in their life, for better or worse.

In fact, it reminded me of two powerful movie scenes. (Both movies are novel adaptations, but I think neither book contains the quote I’m going for.) The one is the famous replicant monologue from “Blade Runner”:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain.

The other one is the epilogue to Stanley Kubrick’s not-so-famous “Barry Lyndon” (it is a shame it’s not more famous, it is one of the most beautifully shot movies I’ve ever seen):

It was in the reign of King George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor; they are all equal now.

So yes, in the long run, nothing you ever do in your life will matter. Deal with it.

But let’s not get all fatalistic, shall we?

Games as Cultural Assets

Now that we’ve established that nothing really matters anyway, why are some things perceived as more important than others? Specifically, why is our notion of “culture” so all-encompassing that basically everything that somebody perceives as culture is culture, but only a small subset is widely accepted as culturally significant enough to be preserved for posterity?

There is of course age. Things can be culturally significant just because they’re old enough that they’re the only surviving cultural expression of their type left from that age. That is why Beowulf or the Merseburg Incantations are part of our cultural canon. Computer games will have to wait for a long time until they’ll be eligible under this rule, except for Pong, maybe.

There is the sheer amount of collective expressive and engineering work funneled into a singular, awe-inspiring creation. We still admire the great (gothic and otherwise) cathedrals, or large palaces, that sometimes took decades to build. Of course, age helps here too, but even in our time, there are great works created that are almost immediately considered symbols of our contemporary culture.

Games have become more and more like the cathedrals and palaces of old. They started as modest huts that a single programmer scraped together from wood and mud, and are growing in scope year after year. A game like SW:TOR probably cost as much as a lavish earl’s palace in its time – maybe not quite Windsor Castle, but still. And Everquest has been constantly extended and refurbished for more than a decade now. Who knows, maybe in our lifetimes, we’ll see a game cathedral erected or two.

Finally, of course, significance is decided by a bunch of people often derided as uppity, snotty, or smug: the critics. These people get a lot of flak, and there sure are bad apples in the bunch, but you have to step back and admit that these people probably do know better than you, just because they spend most of their life looking at culture. They will have the experience to tell you what is just a weak rehash of things that have already been there, they will be able to tell the copycats apart from the real gems; at least in theory, and at least to a certain degree.

Of course, to reach that level of experience, you also need a certain age. I don’t think we’re at a point yet where the leading lights have grown up with the culture of computer games. Many of those people therefore lack experience with this medium – experience that is vital to their work as critics. This insecurity naturally leads to wariness and in some cases even hostility. Look at how long it took comics to become an accepted expression of art, and they’re still not 100% there yet.

So maybe it’s just a question of waiting long enough until computer games get accepted as cultural assets?

Preserving Online Games for Posterity

But this is where it gets complicated. Zubon already pointed it out in his post:

Within your lifetime, the computer environment that ran these games will need to be emulated, because no existing computer will run your MMO without more effort than goes into playing a game off a 5.25″ floppy on your laptop.

Computer games are a kind of interpretative art that is worth nothing without the interpreter. To preserve games, you will need to preserve the original hardware, or, if you’re not quite as purist, create emulators. Preferably emulators that aren’t hardware-dependent themselves, so you could “stack” them to run one in another in another in another, like Matryoshkas, so you don’t fight an uphill battle creating up-to-date emulators over and over again.

It gets even more complicated with online games. How do you preserve an MMO? There are two things that form an MMO, and both are worth archiving, in my opinion.

Preserve server and client software: You need to get your hands on the software to make sure that at any point in time, the game will be accessible by booting the servers, installing the clients, and playing the game. This is actually quite a hard problem. Not only do you now need emulators for both the client and server platforms. Luckily, they might both run the same computer architecture (x86 rules supreme these days), but as soon as you need to emulate a server cluster, because the servers were not designed to run a whole world on a single machine, you’re in a world of trouble. It would be possible, but very cumbersome.

There are projects that try to find out how to properly archive and preserve virtual worlds. I’m sure I read about a funded research project somewhere, but I can’t find the source any more. Maybe I should ask Michael Thomét a.k.a. incobalt, he might know. “Research project” means though that it will probably be years before we have a stable, off-the-shelf solution for archivists.

There is also the problem of intellectual property and patents. While the client side software is readily available, the server side is practically never published by the game company. The best we can do these days typically are emulation servers, like Project 1999 for Everquest and SWGEmu for Star Wars Galaxies. But these come with two problems. First, they’re never 100% the original. Second, they’re on shaky legal terrain. Today, a game company can simply shut down their servers, and if it was hellbent on it, probably still hunt emulation servers and get them taken down.

Preserve the experience: But even if you have a server and clients available, what worth is a virtual world that you are in all by yourself? It’s like preserving an opera house without performing any operas. Ask yourself: what are the things that you remember from the time you played? It bet it isn’t the 10 million rats you killed over the course of 1 million quests. What we remember are those special moments, those attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, that we witnessed – and this is important – with others. You can’t capture these moments by emulating the server and client software, and playing the games years or decades after their death. Many of these moments are special because of their transience: Your guild’s first kill of Nefarian, that epic quest that you finally finished after weeks with help from your friends, the surprise attack in nullsec that annihilated a whole fleet of supercapitals. And even though it was plagued with lag and server overload, many people still speak fondly of the day their server opened the gates to Ahn’Qiraj.

I’m not sure it is technically possible to capture these events, even if you logged the state of the server and who is where and doing what at any given point in time. Just as computer games are interpretative in that they need a computer to run, these settings are interpretative in that they need the view point of those people who remember them to really matter.

In this respect, game videos become more than just a pastime. Those people that created them and uploaded them on youtube obviously considered them important enough to spend some of their free time on editing them to share them with others. I was overjoyed when I found two resources I had long searched for in the last week. The first one was a hard disk I had misplaced that contained some Fraps video I captured when I raided WotLK content with my guild. The second one was a website that contained videos of Curse-Guild raiding Old Naxxramas. I wouldn’t hesitate one second to suggest them as “culturally significant” in the context of WoW videos: they document a raid setting that has long been lost except in the source code repositories of Blizzard, and they do so in quite a good way, documenting both fight tactics (without being “strat vids”) and the overall experience. (We can discuss the choice of music, but at least it’s something else than cheese metal for once.)

In a way, even we bloggers can serve as a resource. Well, I’m not a good example myself, because I don’t have a lot of posts dedicated to a certain game, and my blog is still very young. But bloggers like Wilhelm Arcturus or bhagpuss often focus on their experience in specific games, and often very specific parts of one game (an instanced dungeon, a low-level zone, etc.)

All of these out-of-game resources are immensely important to preserving what a virtual world “was like”. They are similar to a time capsule, documenting all those peripheral bits and pieces that seem insignificant, but may prove invaluable for future historians. There is a reason many archaeologists love digging through kitchen dump. All these out-of-game resources form something akin to a midden for virtual worlds. (And no, I’m not implying either Wilhelm or bhagpuss produce rubbish! I love reading them!)

If we want to document for future generations the cultural significance that virtual worlds had for us, we will need to draw a broad picture. We will need to document why these games were more to us than “kill 10 rats” repeated 1000 times, then “kill the bad guy with 24 random strangers”. Or else all those moments will be lost in time… like tears in the rain.

An Example of a Good Dungeon

2012-02-06Lord of the Rings Onlinedungeon, game design, Goblin-townflosch

A short one this time:

You might want to click this to see anything.

I complained about how dungeons got boring. Now that I returned to LotRO (at least for the time being), I found a great antithesis to the bad design patterns I saw in WoW dungeons. Let me introduce: Goblin-town.

The dungeon is split into 10 small zones, with different design patterns. While the (incomplete) map to the right gives an idea of the expansiveness of the dungeon, it fails (like all LotRO maps) to convey its massive vertical size. The main area, divided into three subzones, is basically a long, dark, flight of halls, but crisscrossed by two additional upper levels of paths meandering along the cave walls and outcrops, with bridges and stairs connecting them. Most of the peripheral subzones make even more use of vertical design; some are deep enough to fall to your death if you’re taking a wrong step on a bridge (and you can fall VERY deep in LotRO before you die, I’d say at least 5 to 6 floors). Sadly, I tried and tired, but I couldn’t manage to get good screenshots to show off the vast, but still claustrophobic feel of this place.

The subzones, and the different halls of the main areas, are interconnected by tunnels that branch off, meet again, have numerous dead ends, and you wonder how the goblins ever made it out of this maze successfully. I got lost several times. At level, it was a classic dungeon crawl. I could spend hours inside there, and actually did, simply exploring and killing Goblins. It took me three evenings to reach the lowest areas.

In one word, Goblin-town is amazing.

Oh, and there’s cave paintings:

This one looks more like a prehistoric painting...

...while this reminds me of modern art.

And somewhere deep down inside, of course, there’s Gollum’s cave. In fact, Bilbo asks you to find it and map out how to get there.

After much back and forth, I found it in the end. And of course, I had to pose for eternity:

Preciousssss! *ahem*

I decided to recall out of the cave. I think getting out without a map would’ve cost me another hour or two. If I ever get another character into the right level range, I sure know where to go.

On Dungeon Design, or: why dungeons became boring

2012-01-31General Game-related Blathering, World of Warcraftdungeon, dungeon finder, game designflosch

Like many another among us bloggers, I have lamented the passing of the good old times more than once. Coming from WoW, it will remain my gold standard for the foreseeable future to gauge every other MMO, for better or worse; and if anything, at least its still immense weight of millions of subscribers makes sure that this comparison can’t be completely useless.

Dungeoning is one of the most discussed parts of WoW and other MMOs. Typically though, this discussion focuses on how to create crate groups, and how WoW’s cross-server dungeon finder has transformed dungeon runs from social experiences or recruitment opportunities for raiding guilds into asocial speedruns. On the other hand, among those that are playing SW:TOR, the dungeon finder makes an unlikely comeback as blogger favorite and favorite wish for the next patch, because without this tool, it seems nigh impossible even for socializers to coax other people into dungeon runs. What with all the, I don’t know, talking, and inviting, and god forbid, running to the dungeon entrance being so last decade!

Two Types of Dungeons

However, I don’t want to discuss the dungeon finder in detail, other people have done that enough recently. There is a different topic, though, that goes hand in hand, and that’s dungeon design. For WoW, the largest shift in design came actually long before the introduction of the dungeon finder.

In Vanilla, dungeons were typically one of two types: either linear, or open and non-linear (or somewhere in between). Let’s look at the original endgame dungeons:

Scholomance was linear with some nooks and crannies, and an optional portion (Jandice’s basement) that you only did if someone needed the warlock shoulders.
Stratholme was non-linear, though in practice, it was split into two sub-instances of which you only did one (live or dead side), and either of them seemed to have a “preferred path” (though different from server to server) to go through that you typically didn’t extend or deviate from.
Dire Maul was non-linear, to the point that not only each of the three official sub-instances was non-linear, but there were even connections between the three that were very convenient for some of the quests.
Blackrock Depths: WoW’s poster child of non-linear dungeons, this was a massive dungeon crawl that was either admired or feared (or both). It was a whole city, actually larger than many of the horde and alliance cities that you could visit, with several subareas that you might not have seen even after a dozen runs.
Blackrock Spire: the two parts (upper and lower) looked similar, but in fact their design was vastly different. Lower was a non-linear group instance, while upper was a mini-raid with what probably was the most linear path through a dungeon in vanilla WoW.

Compare that to Burning Crusade:

Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnace, Shattered Halls: corridor-room-corridor-room.
Slave Pens, Underbog, Steamvault: room-corridor-room-corridor-room.
Auchenai Crypts, Mana Tombs, Sethekk Halls, Shadow Labyrinth: room-corridor-room. In spite of the name, Shadow Labyrinth was one of the most linear instances in the expansion, it didn’t even feature any views of the outside, or an illusion of vertical depth. It was a flat sequence of rooms connected by exactly one corridor each.
Mechanar, Botanica, Arcatraz, and, lest I forget, Magister’s Terrace: I think you can guess by now.
Escape from Durnholde and The Opening of the Dark Portal are fully scripted and therefore linear, even though Durnholde should get an honorable mention for the attention to detail and the fact that you could just go and hang out in old Southshore before or after your dungeon run.

With the introduction of heroic dungeons, we got more choices at the level cap – if you could finish them; some, like Escape from Durnholde were notoriously difficult and almost impossible without raid gear. However, from a dungeon design point of view, there was less choice, because they all followed the same pattern. And I can think of only two Lich King and Cataclysm instances that were not completely linear: The Nexus, where the decision was simply whether you wanted to clockwise or counter-clockwise, and the Halls of Origination with their optional wing.

Dungeon Design and Automated Groups

This simplified dungeon design predated the LFD finder, but it was necessary for it. Without dungeons that were a) of roughly equal length and b) linear, the dungeon finder wouldn’t have been accepted that easily.

If the dungeons are of greatly differing length, a player doesn’t know how long a dungeon run will take, and if you ever played in a dungeon finder group, you know that speed is of the utmost importance. Every minute spent in a dungeon without rushing to the end reduces the badges/time ratio and is frowned upon.

If the dungeons are non-linear, you will have different goals in the group. Some will want to do an optional area, others want to take a specific route to pick up something on the way. Only a completely linear dungeon ensures that the goals of all group members are the same.

So there you have it. Dungeons need to be all similar to each other and highly linear to work well with a fully-automatic LFD. On the other hand, even if you had 50 dungeons available, if there’s no variation in the design, they will become boring. So, in fact, the dungeon finder requires dungeons to be boring to work. Those old vanilla dungeons? To homogenize their length, they got split into several dungeon finder parts. And good luck getting people to continue further after you got your loot bag. Or remember Oculus? Most of my groups lost at least 1-2 people before the first pull, because people hated it for being so different. Oculus was like the blank in the dungeon lottery.

I hated these as a kid. 50% yummy, 50% eww.

LFD requires you to hit one button, then rush through randomly chosen content. People don’t like variety if they don’t have choice over it. If your only input is hitting a button, you expect homogenized output. Everything else is frustrating. Ever had one of these packs of sweets that are half gummy bears and half liquorice? The difference is that you don’t grab stuff blindly and have to eat whatever you grab, even if you hate liquorice. (Yes, I hate liquorice! There, I said it.) It doesn’t work that way with the dungeon finder. You have to eat whatever dungeon dinner is chosen for you, so it better be always the same so it doesn’t offend anyone.

I just wish the SW:TOR players that the introduction of a dungeon finder won’t make liquorice out of all their dungeons.

If a Horse is Already the Carrot, What Then is a Carrot?

2012-01-28Lord of the Rings Onlinemount, Yuleflosch

Quite an unusual color for a carrot.

Recently, this blog has been markedly un-MMOish. First I played Oblivion, then Mass Effect. Then I went of vacation, then there was Christmas, then I played mass Effect 2. I really enjoyed those games, and I realized what I missed from many MMOs. However, recently, my MMO itch has come back. I’ve been killing a lot of rats in LotRO this week (the rats in question in this case being dwarves, but evil dwarves, so that’s fine, and the killing also increased my reputation with the not-so evil dwarves, although, as a hobbit I must say their beer is quite queer, but that doesn’t qualify as outright evil).

So I logged back in earlier this week (for the first time in more than 6 weeks) and realized that the Christmas event, or “Yule” how it is called in LotRO, is still going. That at first was a letdown for me. I’m not a big fan of events in MMOs that mirror real-life events with a weak tacked-on in-game explanation. I did notice though that for the most part, the celebrations were delightfully void of Christmas shenanigans, so I went and tried out a few. Then I realized that there was, like with all those events in all MMOs, many rewards. One of them was a pony.

I think I still prefer the Mathom Society's pony.

I don’t know why; I don’t even think the pony is all that beautiful. Yes, it’s nice, with its grey fur and white/blue tack, but I think I really prefer my Mathom pony. But still, I decided that this carrot should be mine, or maybe I just realized that the stick was sufficiently short, and I would be able to afford the pony after two or three nights of Yule dailies. So off I went, collected marks, did the race (is this really any more than a formality? It seems I could still earn my racing mark riding on my asthmatic grandmother’s back), and paid the usual 200 silver.

Anyway, the plan for the near future is clear: now that I got the one Yule pony, I have to decide whether I also want to get the second one that is available. I’ll also work on Thorin’s Hall reputation. That has two advantages: I don’t need a subscription if I just go in circles killing dwarves and don’t do quest. I also can prepare for Moria, because I heard the goat you get instead of a horse or pony at kindred reputation is also usable inside Moria. I’d hate to have to walk in there. After that, I can collect the remaining pages for my Warden’s legendary traits. And by that time, I’ll be close to 50, and can go to Eregion and Moria.

Looking at that checklist, it seems like I might be back in MMO business for the time being.

On Books and other Worldly Possessions

2012-01-27Even More General Blatheringflosch

I’m still a bit behind on reading posts. I’m now catching up on Raph Koster, who has recently stirred up a lot of comments lately by stating that immersion is dead (I paraphrase). I’ll ignore that for the time being, and focus on another post, where he ponders the inherent value of culture and specifically its means of presentation, with a focus on books.

To me, this has always been an interesting topic, because it seems to be one of those very fundamental opinions that people have diametrically opposed opinions about. It’s certainly a world view topic, in how it shows what is most important to you as a person, what you value as a virtue in and of itself, without any more fundamental reason to it – it is important because it is. Some people value professional success, some value riches. Others may value a perfectly-fitting suit and a trained body. And some people value the feeling of history that is inherent in a first edition book from 1901, or in an original pressing of a certain vinyl record. To those people, history is a virtue in itself. Others might just like the sensual feeling of holding a real book in their hands and turning the pages.

Yes, Raph Koster is probably quite right when he points out that there might be signalling theory involved. But it is also telling when you read the comments to his post. It is obvious how some people immediately understand the feeling of how a large collection on books, proudly presented in your living room, is both awe-inspiring and comforting, while others say they don’t get it and were glad when they could get rid of all their cruft.

I’m one of the history collectors. From my living room windows, I can see our old town hall from the 14th century, which in turn is the only building that prevents me from seeing the cathedral that’s 1200 years old. Looking at them just makes me feel happy like other people might when they look at a sports car. Turning around, I face book shelves that – while not containing anything that can rival Raph Koster’s 1901 Dumas edition – contain a collection of books that are dear to me, both for their age and for having been bought and read by me. There’s also my second-hand record collection. I was so full of joy when one day I found an original pressing of Secret Treaties by Blue Öyster Cult, my favorite album of my favorite band (though, in a strange twist, not my favorite album of all times). I don’t play these records a lot, I admittedly often prefer the convenience of (high-quality) MP3s. But when I do, it’s something I wouldn’t want to miss.

So, what does that mean? I can think of three things.

Never ridicule people for their strange fetishes. People might laugh at me for collecting useless old stuff. I shouldn’t in turn laugh at people worshiping things that seem exceedingly weird to me. Let them do their thing.
One commenter on Raph Koster’s post quoted a piece of advice he got: “Never sleep with anyone who doesn’t have books in their room.” I think I never broke that rule, though if it is specifically about the bedroom, I might need to recheck some locations… which might pose a problem. I’m sure I’d get some weird looks from some of the girls if I asked whether I could check out their bedroom again…
Oh God Oh God I’m already dreading the next move. What with all the books and records and DVDs and other things that will need packing, moving, and unpacking. I should start saving now so I can afford professionals.

What I’m Playing: Mass Effect 2 (Part 3)

2012-01-24General Game-related BlatheringBioware, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2flosch

This being the final part of my ME2 report, it contains spoilers except in the first and last paragraph.

In the first two parts, I looked at game mechanics and the first part of the story, and at the different characters you can recruit. I have now finished the game – finally, after breaks due to traveling to Japan, celebrating Christmas, and a work retreat that involved lots of skiing and discussions. So in the contemporary spirit of “everything that has more than one part shall have three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number of parts thou shalt write, and the number of the parts shall be three. Four shalt thou not write, neither write thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to write a thirdst. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then thou proclaimest a trilogy and a great work before Man complete.”

Ahem. I think I got sidetracked there. Anyway, part 3: overall thoughts on Mass Effect 2.

My opinion on mechanics hasn’t changed since I wrote part 1. I like the streamlined team management, but the removal of a lot of convenient hotkeys compared to ME1 was annoying. Researching equipment is cool, but ONLY researching, no buying, was a bit odd. Likewise, my opinion on my team mates hasn’t changed either since I wrote part 2. There wasn’t much opportunity to change anyway, since with a team that large, interaction gets a bit spread thin. In hindsight, I think the game might’ve benefited from half as many team members with stronger characters. (Or just remove the ones I don’t like! That’s a good solution, isn’t it?)

Last time I wrote about the story, I had played up to and not including the Reaper IFF mission. From there, the story continues at high speed. Basically, after you find the IFF, you are urged to take the one-way trip through the Omega 4 relay as soon as possible. This starts the point-of-no-return endgame, like in so many other RPGs that allow for some non-linearity in the middle part of the game, but have a linear final part.

I liked a lot that, once you were on the other side, you had to assign some of your team members to additional squads for specific tasks. You’ll go in with two members of your team like always, but you might need a technical specialist to go behind the lines and open doors for you, a leader for a second “relieve squad”, or a protector to escort human abductees you saved from the collectors back to your ship. After I finished the game, I read a walkthrough about that part, and it seems there is a bit of choice there. In most cases, it is quite clear who to send: better send Tali as a technician than Grunt. If you don’t, people tend to die. I’m not sure whether that is a very compelling choice, but I guess it’s better than nothing. The choices being so obvious most of the time, I ended up losing not a single one of my team members, but it seems that potentially, you can end up losing most of your crew. In any case, there is some illusion of tactics going on, with squad assignment and radio contact between the different groups while you fight through the collector ship.

The final decision of the game is a bit weird: You were sent in to destroy a collector ship. Just before you set the fuse, the Illusive Man chimes in and suggests you save the ship so Cerberus could investigate its technology. I mulled over that decision for some time, getting up from my chair, having a coffee, walking around, and in the end decided to go through and blow it up.

There are definitely good reasons to save the ship: the argument that the technology might help in defeating the reapers and collectors, who sure as hell will come for you after you destroyed one of their ships, is compelling. Throwing away that opportunity might be a fatal mistake. Indeed, the final scene shows hundreds of collector ships moving in for an attack, setting the scene for the beginning of ME3, no doubt.

On the other hand, it seems that you are missing the most logical choice. You can either destroy the ship, or hand it over to Cerberus. Why not to the Council? I’d rather not hand something that important and powerful over to some dangerous race supremacy group. The Illusive Man confirmed my suspicion when he told me in the final debriefing of the game that I had sabotaged a chance for “human dominance”. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing after all (the sabotage, not the dominance). I also thought about Mordin’s words on Tuchanka, when he suggested that part of the Krogan problem was that they got technology from outside before they were ready for it – a bit like many people say that with thermonuclear weapons, human technology has dangerously outpaced human morality. Finally, the other reaper ships in the game were dangerous even after they were “dead”; they still could warp the minds of organic life forms that stayed close to them. So, I think blowing it up maybe was the right decision after all.

Some final words on ME1 vs. ME2. Overall, ME2 had the better gameplay in my eyes, but I think I liked the ME1 story a bit better. I loved the political machinations that seemed to go on in the background in ME1. Talking with the council on several occasions, seeing how the different representatives and non-council ambassadors interacted, how they tried to move around blame and praise – I really liked that. I had the feeling I got a glimpse of interstellar and interracial politics. ME2 had me, for the most part, interact with some shady human supremacy group leader, and I learned very little about what other races and their representatives thought of that. I’d really love to see the focus more on the Council and different racial groups in ME3 again. I personally would also prefer a smaller team, and get richer interactions with each of the members instead. I understand that the large team probably is supposed to increase replayability, but I realized I’m not a replayer in this kind of game. I make my decisions the first time I play through and stick with them. If I’m curious about a decision, I might read up about the other path in a walkthrough afterwards. But I have no real interest in playing the game a second time, just to create an evil badass Shepard and see what the results are. Maybe I’m different from the average Bioware gamer in that respect?

Random Waypoint

Journeys and Musings of an Ex-Hardcore Raider

Picture Post: Khazad-dûm, at last!

An Example of a Good Dungeon

If a Horse is Already the Carrot, What Then is a Carrot?

On Books and other Worldly Possessions