Wishing for Excitement: The Old Republic

I want to be enthused about The Old Republic. It's Star Wars and Bioware and pretty cinematic trailers. It's supposed to answer questions left hanging from Knights of the Old Republic and is set far enough distant in time to avoid the wearied distaste I felt after reading many many books about Han and Leia and Jacen and Jaina and Ben and haven't I seen too many stories about Jedi going to the darkside already?

But the lack of enthusiasm persists. And while it's tempting to base it on a diminished interest in Star Wars, or the simple fact that I tend to find listening to voice acting tedious when I can read the text three times before they're halfway through speaking it, neither seems to be the real cause of my response.

Quite simply, I don't want a game that appears as if it will tell stories in the same way as a single-player RPG. Being told I, in my uniqueness, arranged a treaty or defeated a horrific foe leads to a collapse of the suspension of disbelief the moment I acknowledge that everyone else is just as unique as I am. I want stories that acknowledge the multitudes of players, and can set them up as special without framing each of them as the one to accomplish some notable event.

In many ways, the divorcing of the story my character is following from one I can share from other players continuously frustrates me, and I wish for other approaches to storytelling.

The problem with challenge.

"Challenge" is a word I see thrown about quite a bit in various gaming discussions, and is usually framed as something that is decreasing.

There are several issues with such discussions, primarily related to how broad of a concept challenge is in video games. E.g., my ability to beat Halo games on Legendary has only a limited relationship to how good I am in the game's slayer mode, let alone my skill at raiding in an MMO or my ability to solve puzzles in Myst.

This means that a challenge can involve such things as reflexes, puzzles, physics-based puzzles, resource management, the use of math to optimize characters, and the ability to memorize complex strategies for a certain encounter.

Some of the discussion on this topic also can degrade to an attitude of hostility towards newer players, or those playing games considered more casual. Such rarely seems to consider how time restrictions and lack of experience, along with some of the technical issues involved with many PC games, can push players towards less demanding content. Insufficient tutorials tends to exacerbate this issue as well.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be looking a bit more in-depth at these various issues, along with providing a few embarrassing anecdotes about my own encounters with challenges in gaming.

The piano puzzle is my nemesis.

I haven't been killed by an Arch Diggle.

Yet. But I have been adventuring in the strange and perilous world of Dungeons of Dredmor.

Short analysis: fun, but potentially problematic to enter when easily frustrated. Also, five dollars.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a game of strange skills (Fleshsmithing!), stranger monsters (Man-eating carrots), humor and a lot of dying. The humor can range from the framing of your hero status as unfortunate, to the inscriptions scribbled on the dungeons walls or the strange location names such as "The Manse of Queens" and "The Disquieting Fjord". Also, there is lutefisk to be offered to a lutefisk god, which is equal parts horror and amusement to me and pure amusement to my friends who have never physically encountered lutefisk. I prefer lefse, but such would be too tasty to go about offering to strange gods.

But, back to death. I have died to traps, my own potions, numerous monsters, and the occasional angry horde produced by a monster zoo. Sidequest spawned bosses proved a particular cause until I resolved to stop accepting such. Given the inclusion of permadeath, and the enjoyment of testing various selections of skills, death is more a setback and a scoreboard than a great irritant.

There are other things that prove irritating. My leap ability rarely seems to function, especially not for crossing moats. And my mustache golem has received an unpleasant death at my hands several times simply to prevent my character from being trapped behind it. Then there's my avatar's habit of pacing back and forth in front of a door several times before opening it, and how inconsistent the Uberchest(TM) is in unlocking.

For whatever reason, the Steam overlay also refuses to work with the game. Which could save my friends from random strange internet poking, but requires me to constantly tab out to communicate with them.

These shoes smell like Subject 17

There will be Assassin's Creed spoilers.

So, Desmond Miles. Our initially clueless protagonist with a fondness for hooded sweatshirts and a certain sense of blandness.

All of these things are important to the storytelling. His lack of knowledge provides a perfect opportunity to explain the function of the Animus, the nature of the game's main conflict, and various other tidbits that it's nice for the player to know. It also avoids the problem of having characters explain things they already know to each other.

The sweatshirts fall into the territory of the hooded assassin look, and require little explanation beyond that.

And then, the blandness. Some of this has abated as the series has continued and Desmond has gained both knowledge and ability. Other portions could be framed in terms of the video-game protagonist as player insert and avatar.

Simply, players can put themselves into the role of Desmond, thus allowing for more opportunities for Altaïr and Ezio to be established as characters of their own, with distinct personalities and actions that can occur outside of what players may actually want.

Altaïr's altercation with Robert de Sable of the first game set him up as an arrogant failure, a state that could make him a bit harder to identify with without the intervention of Desmond. And Ezio's sparing of Rodrigo Borgia at the end of AC2 would have proved most irritating to me if I viewed him as my puppet rather than someone whose actions Desmond was exploring.

I do wish Desmond had better hair, though. Comparing him to Ezio shows just how much of a difference that can make.

Can-flipping < Scrolls of Icarian Flight

After recently introducing a friend to EVE online, he received advice from both myself and a mutual friend about cargo containers. Namely, that before he would encounter any information within the game tutorials about loot rights on such, players would be trying to tempt him into taking items from the containers.

Unsurprisingly, a container bearing a comment about "free items for new players" tends to prove rather appealing to anyone who doesn't realize that the color-coding means that their taking of such items counts as a theft that can be retaliated against within game mechanics.

On my recent excursion through the new player experience of EVE, I saw many such containers, along with advertisements for corporations and services, scattered through the systems that the starting agents and Sisters of EVE epic chain will bring new players through. New players seem to make solid targets for padding killboards, at least, though most of them have little of value to loot from their wrecks.

The main issue, of course, isn't that players in a game with numerous opportunities for PvP are being destroyed, but that some of them are experiencing such in a fashion induced by mechanics the game hasn't introduced. Being blown up is much more tolerable when you possess some understanding of what mechanics allowed such to happen.

And I've seen some painful nerd-rage from new players who have been can-flipped.

Fallen Earth

Free time game time...hmmm...sure. Hopefully the game won't run into the updater issues that I encountered previously.

On some level, the game strikes me as, to parody the common analysis of Fallout 3, as "Morrowind with guns". Given that the only friend I have who has tried the game considered the combat somewhat clunky, I may be more accurate than I thought.

Or not. Have to play around a bit first. Faction system has always looked appealing, though.

CCP's Dev Blog

* Vacation + catching up + injuring my wrist = failure at blogging.

First, World of Darkness is not Twilight. This is not difficult to understand. Reducing everything involving vampires, werewolves, or some sort of urban fantasy to an attempt to cash in on Twilight is approximate to considering all science fiction something to try to profit off Star Wars. I am admittedly excited about the idea of a World of Darkness MMORPG, though I much prefer the oWoD background stuff for Mage: The Ascension (rules confuse me, though).

In any case, the Developer blog here is quite interesting. I find the variety of information that CCP provides about the game process appealing, though not all of it is particularly comprehensible.

This information about development teams would be much more useful if there was some sort of baseline to which it could be compared. Overall, I can't see much devoted to fixing bugs, outside of the teams dedicated to exploits and debugging fleet battles.

I haven't run into any major bugs within the game yet, but the Catalyst model issue becomes irritating at times.