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Why hello there, Intertubes. No, I haven’t been avoiding you, I just haven’t had much to talk about. I haven’t really been playing anything new, and since I’m still not playing any MMOs, I don’t really have much I can talk about, game-wise, for the moment. I do have some mildly related things to talk about, though, which can be conveniently placed in list format! I love lists.
1. What the fuck, WordPress? It’s seriously been weeks since my “Preview” button has worked properly, and it’s pissing me off. I’ve updated WP twice since then, why isn’t it working? RAGE.
It really has no right to look this nice.
2. The 360 and PS3 versions of Assassin’s Creed 2 are currently $36 on Amazon. I haven’t played the first game, since I don’t own it; Josh borrowed the first game from a friend but never finished it due to the tediousness of it, so my exposure to it in general is pretty limited. We’ve been told by some very awesome people that the second one is actually worth playing, even if the first wasn’t, though, so we’re going to check it out. We’ll probably be getting it sometime next week, because we’re cheap and shipping was free. In the mean time, I suppose I could finally get around to playing Dragon Age: Origins. Speaking of…
3. Orson Scott Card will be writing the Dragon Age comics. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. On one hand, he’s an amazing writer. Ender’s Game has been and probably always will be one of my favourite books of all time. It’s heavily influenced what I look for in fiction and how I write myself, when I can be bothered to write. On the other hand, Card is a raging homophobe who thinks I suffer a reproductive disorder and thinks that courts legalising gay marriage spells the end of democracy in America, whereas DA:O is very gay-friendly (even compared to Mass Effect). I’m guessing that homosexuality will just be ignored altogether, not openly bashed, but it’s still a step backwards from open acceptance.
4. Uh, here, have some short Aion-related fiction. Lately I’ve been working sporadically on the backstory of Amarantha, my Elyos ranger, and, to a lesser extent, Kallias, my Elyos cleric, despite not playing Aion in months. I’m very easily distracted so there’s like fuck-all written, but who really wants to sit down and read a novel on the internuts, anyway? While I wanted to post it in parts that were still long enough to be interesting, instead I’m going to post them in parts that are completed. I won’t pretend that my writing is great, or that this will be interesting to anyone who didn’t roleplay with me, but here it is regardless. I’ve wanted to write and post this pretty much forever, so, hopefully posting part of it will convince me to write the rest more quickly. I’ll post more as it’s completed.
Anyway, I hate third-person walls-of-explanation for backstories, so I’ve tried a more narrative format, and I hope you enjoy what little there is so far.
Eulogy for Amarantha, Part 1
Continue reading And Now For Something Completely Different
Or, “I beat Mass Effect 2 yesterday and feel I should write about it”. Or or, “It’s 6AM and I haven’t slept, let’s see how coherent a post I can get out”.
I’m not sure I can sum up my feelings about this game quite as simply as I did the first. Yes, I consider that long-ass post simple, since I summed up my thoughts in the title and just elaborated on them in the actual post. This new game takes a lot of the suggestions fans gave about the first and runs with them, but I don’t necessarily think it was all for the better.
Since most of this is going to be a comparison to the first game, rather than a blow-by-blow of the mechanics vs story, I’ll get the spoiler warning out of the way now. Maybe I’ll even bother learning how to do a LJ cut so people don’t have to complain about my ruining a shiny new game for them.
Mild Gameplay Spoilers Ahead!
All right, we all good? Let’s talk changes.
Not a picture of actual combat but you get the idea!
Continue reading Second Verse, (Not Quite) Same as the First
Look at that title. I just summed up everything I’m about to say and I don’t even have to say it. I could stand back, look proud of myself and just let the title speak for itself.
However, I’m not. I suspect I will have hundreds of fanboys raging all over the place here if I were to, so I’ll qualify what I just said with some experiences.
For most of the fights worth a damn I used Liara and Alenko, actually.
As I said, the game itself was really good, but I feel I should qualify that too: it was really good when I was playing a Soldier. When I first started up the game, I figured I’d probably play a Soldier because I’m boring and like killing things, but after looking at the classes I figured I’d go for something I don’t usually play, and chose the mage Adept. The combat controls were confusing at first (the game arbitrarily has different movement controls for combat and non-combat), especially since you can’t zoom out, so despite it being third person I still got that “no peripheral vision” feeling that comes with first person shooters. Anyway, I quickly discovered that you can’t keybind more than one ability — despite never using the D-pad for anything the entire game — so if you want to play something that relies as much on abilities as it does on shooting things, and you’re not playing on the PC, you’d better like pausing combat. A lot.
After dealing with the flow-breaking pausing, or just ignoring it and shooting things for the entire first mission, I finally said “fuck this” and re-rolled. Maybe it’s because I could dump all my points in assault rifles since I knew I wasn’t going to use anything else, maybe it was because I’d gotten the hang of the way combat worked, but I immediately had much more fun with the Soldier and went on with the game. I did get a couple abilities throughout the game (well, “a couple” isn’t accurate, I had almost as many as Liara by the end) but most of the time I forgot they existed and just shot things till one of us died. The only ones I ever really took advantage of were my party resurrect and the one that reset all my abilities so I could use the resurrect again. These two got used a lot, too, because the entire party liked to huddle around me, and if I was behind cover, instead of going off to find their own cover nearby, they’d stand in the open near me and get killed. Despite this, the way the fights are set up I was grateful to have party members, especially later on when Kaidan and Liara both got Lift.
Lift is awesome.
As for the non-combat parts… Well. I often found it stupid that one charm speech would cause people to rethink their entire diabolical plan/career choice/life, but I guess it’s better than requiring five conversation trees of the exact same thing. There was also one thing that bothered me with the reporter coming to talk to you sidequest… I knew it was the Renegade option to tell her to fuck off, and I was going for a Paragon, but I chose it anyway because I’d previously promised Emily Wong, another reporter and recurring quest NPC, that she would be the first to get an exclusive interview. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to remember this promise because it never comes up again and everyone acts like you’re an ass for not doing the interview, and there’s no way to tell people I refused in order to keep my promise to Wong (thereby doing the right thing). Why make things like that a dialogue option at all if you’re going to assume the player will completely forget about them?
Other than hiccups like that, I really enjoyed the dialogue parts. I’m one of those OCD types who will get as much information out of an NPC as possible, which often led to spending ridiculous amounts of time chatting, though. Rarely in a game am I so eager to get back to the action after spending time in town as I was in Mass Effect.
The game also feels very short. I clocked in a little less than 27 hours, and I did most of the sidequests, talked to everyone and was generally very slow-going. While most of the sidequests were very repetitive and can be skipped without missing anything, the main story mode had some very interesting “dungeons”, bosses, and quest lines, but if you only did them you’d probably beat the game in under 15 hours. (Plus another 2-5 worth of deaths from those really stupid Mako missions.) Perhaps it’s for the best to keep you wanting more instead of wishing it’d just end already, but the story itself could have used a bit more fleshing out, to say the least.
Which brings me very neatly to my next topic: why the story in Mass Effect can suck a big hairy dick. But first…
Warning: Here There Be Spoilers
Continue reading Good Game, Shitty Story: The Mass Effect Experience
When Tuesday came around, I decided I would update this thing. Tuesdays are a good day for updates and going about a week between updates is as long as I should probably expect to go without people wondering why I opened this site in the first place.
Anyway, as you can see, Tuesday rolled around with no update. This is because I was exceptionally busy playing Mass Effect.
This isn’t from my game, but I’m playing on the 360 so you won’t get any shots of my hot, female Shepard.
Obviously I don’t have to tell you that I’m behind the times on this one. Mass Effect 2 is out now, and most everyone in the world is playing it, while I’m still stumbling through the first one, in awe of its newness. I figured that if we’re going to be getting ME2 at any point soon, I should finish this one. And besides, the plot of FFIX has decided to shit itself inside out, so I wanted to take a break and play something that tries to make sense for a change.
I’m still not done, so I shouldn’t have to tell you to take everything with a grain of salt, but am I the only one who thinks this game is incredibly short? I’m already nearing the end of the storyline and I’ve been playing for less than 20 hours. I think. I might have been playing for more than 20 hours now, as I spent all of yesterday playing. But that just brings me back to my point — I spent almost all of yesterday doing sidequests so I could clear them out of my quest log. Other than apparently hiding all the good gear in locked crates in the sidequests, they serve very little purpose, other than making the game appear longer than it is. Is it so wrong to just have a long, linear plot? I mean, the game gives you a choice as to which “main” area to do first (find Liara, go to Feros, or go to Noveria), but since you can do them in any order, half the things you learn from Feros and Noveria overlap. If, like me, you did Noveria first, you learn pretty much nothing from the Feros questline, and it seems especially stupid that all your characters are acting surprised at a plot point they’ve already resolved. Yes, you twats, of course Benezia was brainwashed, we figured that out when SHE TOLD US RIGHT BEFORE WE KILLED HER. (Oh, spoilers, by the way.)
There are a lot of things I want to talk about with this game, but I’ll save them for when I’m done, or at least till next week. For now I want to talk about the gay.
A race of blue space lesbians? Why not?
It’s not exactly a secret that I’m not straight. If you didn’t know and this post isn’t your first introduction to me, what the fuck is wrong with you? How many times do I have to say a chick is hot before you figure it out?
Anyway. As I briefly mentioned above, one of the characters you get on your party, Liara, is a member of a race of space lesbians (the Asari). Their entire species is female, which would be dangerous around that time of the month, but thankfully they don’t reproduce normally so they probably don’t get that time of the month. I don’t know, the game isn’t really clear on this part. Anyway, they aren’t really gay because they don’t have the same concepts of gender and don’t reproduce the same way, but their inclusion brings up a question that I’m sure no one else was wondering: we have lesbians, but where are the gay men?
This is something I’ve noticed in a few video games. Many sandbox games that let you romance people for no reason (or for blood, if this is Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines) lets you seduce women, if male, and seduce women and sometimes men, if female. The only real exception to this rule that I can think of is Fable. The developers figure that most of their players will be men, and since girl on girl is hot, they’ll include it, but they don’t include man on man. The fact that the Asari don’t really think in terms of “straight” and “gay” doesn’t excuse it, because humans do, and since the player is human, they are going to think of it in that way. The player character likely thinks like that, too, as evidenced by some of the dialogue options you can choose from when Liara’s flirting with you. So why are we arbitrarily allowed to be a gay woman and not a gay man? Were they worried about how people would feel about Kaidan if he hit on your male character?
Absolutely not gay.
I don’t think saying they were worried about offending people is accurate. If they were, they wouldn’t have gay in the game at all. There are plenty of bigots who don’t like lesbians, and plenty of bigoted women who might want to play the female Shepard, even if both are in the minority. Any gay woman can tell you how many times they’ve been told “I don’t mind that you’re a lesbian/bisexual, as long as you don’t hit on me”. If they were really worried about offending people, they’d also have more than a handful of human NPCs be something other than white. Think I wouldn’t notice this one, did you, BioWare? I like how most of the non-white NPCs are given prominent positions, too, so they can be proud of their lack of racism, despite the fact that this one prominent NPC will often be the only *insert race/nationality here* on the entire planet.
I’m getting off topic, though. I guess what I’m trying to say is “Don’t do something half-assed”. (Or, alternately, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining”.) If you want to attract female and gay gamers, and try to do so by making lots of female party members and NPCs, making the player able to choose to play a woman, and making the player able to be gay, don’t say “We’ve included gay women but not gay men” and expect us to say “I love being objectified! You’re right, lesbians are super hot while gay men threaten the masculinity of your playerbase and your developers”. Doing something half-assed ruins all the good feelings any of these groups could have for you for including them, even if you honestly meant no ill will and were trying to do the right thing by including them.
(Plus Liara is really fucking annoying, and has some of the worst-written dialogue in the game, but that’s neither here not there.)
It’s been a while, hasn’t it, Internets? I’ve been meaning to get in touch, but you know how these things are. Most of my gaming time in the last week has been taken up by the Sims, which is boring to write about, finishing up the million new side quests in Chrono Trigger, which I already wrote about, and Final Fantasy IX, which I- … Oh, wait. Final Fantasy then.
I don’t really understand why Amarant is on the cover over, say, Freya, who is not only cooler, but also more important to the plot.
I started this game back in September, right after finishing Chrono Cross again. Lumiel, my Aion server of choice, had ridiculous queues when the game first launched so I decided to waste some time on a game I’d never played before. It was either this or Metal Gear Solid, and I decided if I was going to spend all my time reading it might as well be in a game where I don’t have to think too hard about combat.
Despite playing it for four months now, I’m still not done. When Aion picked up I played less and less, and then got distracted by other games (like Chrono Trigger). I picked it up again the other day, and while it was damn hard to get back into at first — a problem any game where, at 30 hours, the plot still hasn’t resolved — I managed to find a quick summary of what I was doing and why I was doing it on GameFAQs and off I went. The more I played, the more I remembered, and I’m not at a place where I feel confident in my ability to not completely forget what’s going on, which is good, because I’m still not done.
Now, I’m not going to review this game. Much like with the Chrono games, I don’t really see the point in reviewing something so old, and I’m still not done. A wise man once said that you should never assume a good game will stay good, so I’m going to avoid falling into that trap, too. Instead, I’m going to talk about the problems I see with Final Fantasy as a whole because it’s more relevant. If you think I’m wrong, or are going to have a heart attack over someone being mean to your precious franchise, I suggest you fuck off before I decide your comments are spam.
(Alternately, you could just read all this and then complain about how often I use the word fuck, as if I’m supposed to change the way I write to accommodate your irrational hatred of a fucking word.)
Even on the PSX the cinematics at least looked nice, even if they’re not amazing by today’s standards.
1. The main characters are generally unlikeable twats. To be fair, Zidane isn’t as much of a twat as, say… Tidus, but I find his dialogue in general to be retarded poorly written trying too hard. Josh kind of likes Zidane because he reminds him of Locke; I haven’t played all of FFVI, but I didn’t like Locke, either. This will probably turn into a completely off topic tangent, but I find this to be a problem with anime, too. When I in grade 9, my English teacher explained how if you have three main characters in a story, generally, you have the hero, an opposite sex version of the hero (usually emphasising the hero’s positive qualities), and a usually same sex opposite of the hero (usually emphasising the negative). In the case of things like Harry Potter, this leads to Hermione being good at the things Harry is not, and Ron being generally shit at everything. In anime, and most Squenix games, the hero is the Ron, the leading female, being a mirror of the Ron, is a cunt, and the best friend is the one anyone with a brain ends up rooting for. I mean, even if you felt sorry for him, did anyone really like Shinji from Evangelion? Even if you did, don’t you think you’d have liked him more if he were more mature — more like Rei? Final Fantasy games obviously have more than three main characters, but they still follow that same formula. Since the hero and leading lady are so annoying (usually — Garnet is actually pretty tolerable IMHO), the best friend characters are the ones people like — in the case of Final Fantasy IX, in my opinion, this is Freya. It’s too bad she’s a dragoon, I never really like actually playing with those.
Woops, wrong game.
2. Random encounters. It’s kind of stupid to complain about the combat mechanics of a JRPG, since they’re generally shit by definition, but fuck do I hate random encounters. The Chrono twins spoiled me on that one. I didn’t bother getting a chocobo until I was already on disc three, too, so you can imagine how many random encounters I’ve done. The world map ones don’t usually bother me as much as the ones that happen when I’m in the middle of running from one end of a dungeon to the other to finish up a puzzle. Hate.
3. Random plot twist from the writer’s ass half way through. This is, again, a problem that plagues many Squenix games (see again: Chrono Cross). It builds up to something the entire game and then just says “Well now that that’s out of the way, you have to deal with this, too.” Even if it makes sense and fits in perfectly, like all the Terra shit in FFIX, it’s usually completely unnecessary. The game isn’t made better by its inclusion, so why is it there? Do they even have editors over there? Perhaps the Terra shit isn’t the best example, as it fits in much better than the Time Devourer did, but would the story have been any worse if the Big Bad wasn’t a space alien? No? Then why the fuck is he one?
4. Fuck over the top villains. Does this really need any more explanation? At least I won’t hate the hero and love the villain, that’s for certain.
Over all, I like the Final Fantasy series. This game in particular is proving very enjoyable; the story is good so far, if long, and there are enough likable characters to make me not want to throw my controller at the screen in rage. I like the ability leveling up system, though it can lead to unnecessary grinding sometimes, and wonder if the system they’ll use in the upcoming FFXIV will be similar.
Oh, and I still haven’t played XII, either. Maybe I should get GameFly while I wait for an MMO worth a damn to come out.
While many of you were going off to start a new week of work today, I decided I should suck up my reservations about STO and jump into the beta. All I can really say is that I was right to be as unexcited about this game as I was.
The first thing I noticed when I opened up the character creator is how incredibly lazy the meshes for most of the human-looking races. The really weird looking races look appropriately weird, but I noticed immediately that the Bajoran nose ridges weren’t actually part of the face mesh, they were just “drawn on” on top of a generic human face with shading. This isn’t really game breaking, but it appears really lazy on Cryptic’s part. That said, I didn’t run into a lot of Bajorans so maybe it makes sense to not bother. (“This is a recession, dammit!” my mind tells me.)
On the other hand, when I went to check out the Klingon character creation, I noticed they did the same thing with them, and they’re a major fucking racial faction. With all the effort they put into making the create-your-own-race generator, you’d think they’d put a little effort into making Klingons not look like shit.
You’d think that with so much time spent loading it’d look nicer than this. (Also, smooth forehead blah blah insult blah blah nerd.)
Anyway. I was more interested in trying out the Klingons, but since their faction is only unlockable after you complete a mission at level 5-6ish, I decided to make a Fed first. Josh had already unlocked Klingons, and I used his beta account, but I figured I could use a bit of an introduction through the opening tutorial because I am notoriously bad at picking things up without being given some time to process things. I mean, hell, it took me until level 60 to figure out my death knight in WoW, and that was only after I respecced blood because unholy had too much going on*.
Hot damn I am the Queen of Off Topic tonight. Getting back on topic, I knew I wanted to play a science officer because I wanted to heal, and I knew I wanted to be a hot chick. I’m a fan of Star Trek, but my exposure to it isn’t as great as some other people’s, so while there were tons of races I was only vaguely familiar with most of them. I’ve been watching season one of Deep Space 9 recently, so I was drawn to the Bajorans, but the aforementioned laziness kind of turned me off to them. Their stories are interesting, though, and I imagine I’d have fun roleplaying one if I ever got around to actually doing any roleplaying, and their stats seemed to be good for a science officer, but in the end I chose to make a Betazoid. I liked the threat reduction passive trait, one of the Bajoran default traits that benefits healing was a selectable one, and they look almost identical to humans, so Cryptic couldn’t fuck them up, right?
Wait a second…
Yes, that’s right. That is, in fact, a Betazoid, and not a human. Despite mentioning that all Betazoids have black eyes right in the fucking race description, lots of different colours were selectable. Not only that, but black wasn’t even an option. None of the dark colours looked remotely black. Now, I’m not the kind of person who really gives a shit if they adhere religiously to stupid specific facts about every single race, but they could at least have some continuity between what they say on their own race select screen and what they actually look like. What the fuck, Cryptic. Oh well. Black eyes or no, there’s something about a woman who knows exactly what you want, so I rolled with it.
I know, I know. For someone who claims not to care much about graphics I am certainly bitching about them a lot. Make no mistake, I think there’s very little excuse for some of the ugly scenery and characters, and beta testing is a wonderful time to be critical of a game, but I would never give up on an otherwise good game because of something retarded like this. Hell, WAR’s graphics were pretty bad and I thought that game was hot shit, so your mileage may vary.
Now that I had my fancy new Betazoid science officer all customised and ready to go, I started to play through the tutorial mission. Ground combat is fairly standard for MMOs, but with a couple neat and not-so-neat additions. You can hit C to crouch and aim, which does more damage, and depending on where you’re attacking from versus where your party members are attacking from, both of which I actually like. In some ways it gives a weird sort of third person shooter feel, but the flanking bonus reminded me happily of D&D and provided some sort of feeling of tactics without being too complicated. I was actually beginning to think that I had been wrong in my assumptions about the game; while the combat wasn’t particularly new or exciting enough to make me want to buy the game, it wasn’t godawful.
And then I tried space combat, and holy FUCK is it bad.
You know you’re travelling slowly when they have to put a grid down so you know you’re not standing still…
Last week, Awitelinsta very correctly pointed out that ships in Star Trek canonically handle like ass and so people shouldn’t be surprised about this (I’m paraphrasing, of course). I can’t disagree with her on this point; I actually bring it up because it’s true, not despite it being true. It’s very true to the source material, and that’s the problem.
In all things, this game captures the feel of Star Trek, and while in the case of, say, the music, that’s a good thing, in this case, it’s terrible. Space combat is slow, the flight controls are awkward and unintuitive, and that’s saying nothing of the combat controls themselves. While I absolutely despise the way you jack up the throttle to move forward and then steer with the mouse (or keyboard if you hate yourself), it makes sense to have an “auto-go” button as soon as you get into combat. Firing weapons, sending power to specific shields, and changing ship power modes for in- and out-of-combat situations are controlled by completely different areas of the keyboard and screen. Coming from a game like Aion, where combat is smooth, with combos being simple to perform, this is a fucking nightmare.
Now, I know what you’re going to say. “Of course your ship was a bag of shit, it was the first one you get!”, or maybe “Flight in Aion is pretty awkward too, and you got used to it!” After these voices went through my head after my first ragequit, I came back fresh to finish up my quest and go do some more of the more enjoyable ground combat. I finished up the space combat bit as quickly as possible and beamed onto a planet to rescue some civvies from the Borg, getting my first kit and having my first experience with the NPC away team.
The kit system was another thing I found interesting. They’re items you equip that add extra ground abilities to your arsenal (in my case, I picked a healing kit and got… uh… a heal). Other abilities seemed to be affected by what weapons you were carrying, too, so it seems that combat is heavily reliant on what you have equipped. This system interests me, but my enthusiasm was almost entirely drained away by the stupid away team mechanic.
When you’re soloing on the ground, your officers — which you choose yourself and can customise quite a bit later — come with you. They act as pets do in most other MMOs, having different abilities based on their classes and you can give them (very limited, from what I saw) commands. This annoys me to no tomorrow. I absolutely hate anything that resembles a pet class in MMOs, and this reminds me just a little bit too much of that. Even playing group-based RPGs like anything by BioWare can piss me off quickly. I want to control a character, not half a dozen characters. Micromanaging all those characters aggravates me and I dislike having all those bodies around in combat; maybe I’m just full of myself but I prefer to just do things myself, and see what I’ve done myself, than have four NPCs kill all the mobs for me. Playing Dragon Age: Origins this weekend I was reminded of this when I’d turn around and my party members had killed most of the other monsters. What’s the point in playing, then? I realise this is an entirely subjective thing, as I doubt most people feel as strongly as I do about actually being alone when soloing, but it did hinder my enjoyment of one of the only enjoyable things about this game.
After that, and knowing there was more space combat and space “fast” travel ahead of me, I decided I was going to give up on this tutorial and learn on the fly as a Klingon so I could get some PvP in before I exploded.
Not actually a Klingon, but I wanted to be hot, remember?
As you can see, I went for an Orian chick with big boobs in order to make myself feel better. After wandering around the base, completely lost for a while, I finally got a few quests to go kill some dudes, which I happily accepted and got started on.
The first thing I did, stupidly, was some space PvP. The Bird of Prey handled a bit better that the bucket I had as a Fed (or maybe it was just my imagination wanting it to be better), but it was still amazingly bad. I have never in my life enjoyed PvP so little, and I played a ret paladin in 40 minute Alterac Valleys back in The Burning Crusade*. (And loved it.) The Kia of Prey, as the hilarious sfdebris, aka Chuck — not to be confused with this Chuck — calls it, may handle nicer and have some extra bells and whistles compared to the first Federation ship, like stealth, but it still handles like shit at the end of the day. Unresponsive controls, seemingly slow speeds (a car would close 10 clicks faster than these fucking ships), and the awkward fighting mechanics I mentioned earlier combined to make PvP a wholly unenjoyable experience.
Unfortunately, when I went to try out some ground PvP, the game decided it was going to bug out and the only game I was able to join was about a minute away from completion. I also didn’t have a kit on my Orian, so despite being a science officer as well I couldn’t heal, or really do anything useful other than use my Seduce trait as a sort of CC and hack people to death with my Klingon sword-thing. The only NPCs I found who had kits for sale didn’t have any I could afford, which made me wonder why my level threeish Fed got one automatically but my level seven Klingon had to work for them. The PvP game itself was enjoyable, and I would like to try more of it before the beta is done, but this is the sort of thing I always enjoy in a game. The PvP wasn’t so much better than any other PvP game out there, though; there was nothing about it that said I should switch to STO for it.
As I just touched on briefly, there were a lot of bugs. A lot a lot. I didn’t notice any major ground combat bugs that people had been reporting last week, other than the occasional glitch where you beam onto the ground but your toon still looks like a ship, but that one usually fixes itself quickly. The PvP bug was the most aggravating: I would go to join a queue for a game, and when it told me I could join, it would then give me a message saying I wasn’t queued. While you’d think I’d be more concerned about these bugs, really, I’m not. I’m giving Cryptic the benefit of the doubt on this one. Unlike the graphical/gameplay problems, I assume most, if not all of these issues will be sorted out by the end of beta, and definitely at launch. They might not be, but they’d be very stupid to not learn from Mythic’s mistake of releasing a game that needed more ironing out.
If I merely focus on the gameplay aspects that are working as intended, I can tell very definitively that this game isn’t for me, even without getting a chance to group or do any significant PvP. I would even go so far as to say that it’s damn awful, if we’re talking about any of the things that take place in space. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think anyone could enjoy it, I just don’t understand why they would. The only really good parts of this game are done better by other games; the only truly unique aspects are the Star Trek universe, and (to a degree) the space crap, the former of which negatively impacts the latter. If I seem like I’m ragging too hard on this aspect of the game, consider how much time has to be spent blowing up shit in space in any given Star Trek episode, and then translate this to an MMO. If Cryptic had chosen to make a sci-fi MMO out of something other than Star Trek, rigorous adherence to what ships behave like in canon wouldn’t be an issue, and then they could build on some of the good and less good qualities of the game without worrying about the giant pink elephant in the room.
But then they’d have the issue of actually having to make a good game that people who aren’t already fans of a franchise would want to play, and that’s just too fucking hard, now, isn’t it?
*Holy WoW references Batman. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, uh… consider yourself lucky?
This should come as a surprise to no one, but I’m already behind on my planned three-per-week update schedule. This is mostly due to the fact that I was awake for a grand total of maybe five hours yesterday. Not having a job is awesome.
Anyway. As you no doubt guessed from my oh-so-clever title, there are many MMOs coming out soon(ish). Most of them you probably don’t give a shit about (I know I don’t), but here are some of the ones you might care about.
The graphics, while not awful, could definitely be better.
1. Star Trek Online
I like Star Trek. I even like a lot of the “bad” shit, like Voyager, since my standards for TV in general are pretty low. So long as the story makes a bit of sense and the characters aren’t all completely flat, I can enjoy something. Despite this I have literally no interest in STO, and would probably not even give it the time of day if it weren’t for the fact that Josh is in the beta right now. I actually wanted to save this post till after I got a chance to play the game (I planned to play yesterday) but my awesome sleep schedule got in the way of that. It’ll be nice to show my opinions before playing and after playing, though, anyway.
My main grievances with the game, at this point, are a) the ship vs humanoid avatar system, b) the apparent lack of dungeons, and c) it’s not only sci-fi, it’s Star Trek. The ship system reminds me uncomfortably of WoW’s absolutely horrible vehicle sections. Of course, ships are different from one another and all that, but it’s incredibly impersonal feeling to me. I will have to see what I think about it after I take a look at the beta, but at the moment I’m not too impressed with the idea in general. I don’t care if it’s “innovative” (it’s not), it isn’t really something I’d have much interest in. I want to play my character, not my character’s ship.
From what I’ve researched/been told/beaten out of people, the way instancing works in STO reminds me a lot more of public quests in WAR, and elite areas in Aion, than it does of typical dungeons. Now, I liked PQs. I thought they were interesting and cool, and was very disappointed when few people showed up to do them. However, I would never take a PQ over a traditional instance. Instancing provides a very different sort of grouping experience that PQs or elite grinding does. While both provide rewards, an opportunity to group, and the possibility of bosses, the kind of bosses that a dungeon provides are usually very different. I’ll update more on my thoughts on the system after I get a chance to get into it, but so far I’ve heard nothing that says these instances will provide interesting, challenging scripted boss encounters. Bosses are one of the main things I look for in an MMO, and if this one doesn’t provide the sort I’m interested in, I won’t even bother with it.
As for it being sci-fi… A lot of sci-fi MMOs seem to be in production right now. I guess this is because the fantasy MMO has pretty much dominated the genre since it started, but I think there’s a reason for that. Fantasy roleplaying doesn’t require an extensive knowledge of retarded techno babble, for one. Indeed, in most fantasy settings you can get away without knowing really anything, and you can still roleplay a believable character, since most settings are based on medieval Europe and people were pretty ignorant back then as a rule. You can’t really be a Star Fleet commander without knowing at least the history of the Federation, or how to tell two suspiciously human-looking races apart, can you? That’s not even getting into the technobabble!
There’s the fact that I don’t want to be the only chick on the server, or that, as Kona_Kona points out most of the STO RPers are apparently retards. I don’t think I really need to touch on that right now. What I will say is that any of you who haven’t preordered to get a beta key still have plenty of time; beta ends January 26. The game goes live on February 2.
So what if it’s a concept render? It’s a nice-looking concept render, and I have no screenshots. Yet.
2. Final Fantasy XIV
I have never played Final Fantasy XI. From everything I hear, I would either love it (since I love games that lean towards the hardcore) or hate it (I like to be able to solo occasionally after all). Either way, FFXIV seems to be following the long-standing Final Fantasy tradition of not making direct sequels (X-2 never happened and fuck you if you say otherwise), so I shouldn’t be too far out in the water as far as story is concerned. Admittedly, I am interested in this game, though there are a few things about it that make me wonder whether my interest will translate to excitement or disappointment: the job system and PvP.
FFXIV isn’t going to have experience or levels like most MMOs. At first, this seems like a great idea, but after a bit of consideration I’m not entirely sure I like it. How exactly will people progress from utter crap to pretty awesome? Since levels aren’t going to exist, job classes will instead focus on what weapon you’re using — i.e. if you’ve got a staff equipped you’ll be a magic user, and if you switch to a sword your class will change to something more warrior-like. Again, that’s all fine and dandy, but how do you progress? Getting new weapons? Where do you get them, from monsters? How are you able to tell the relative strength of a monster without level indicators? How quickly will you be able to acquire the best gear in the game? All these things can make or break this system, which makes me wonder why they didn’t just use levels. The idea of switching classes on the fly is pretty cool, though, so we’ll see.
Of course, FFXI isn’t exactly known for its PvP, and it’s been difficult to find information on it. Much like a game’s dungeons, the amount and quality of a game’s PvP can make or break it in my mind. What’s especially worrying is that many forum-goers seem to be against putting PvP in FFXIV out of fear of it taking the limelight away from the PvE content. This is beyond retarded. The amount of people who enjoy the occasional PvP game far outnumbers the amount who want to ignore it completely. From a game developer point of view, what would make them not want to put PvP in the game? That said, their PvP may be limited to games similar to WoW’s battlegrounds, and that would be… a bit disappointing. I could probably get by on that if they were popular and fun enough, but open, large-scale RvR is really where it’s at.
For those of you unaware, the beta isn’t going to be linked to preorders the way most games are doing it. Instead, potential beta testers can sign up for a shot at the beta on the official site. It’s free, so if you’re at all interested, you might as well. As far as I know the beta date(s) haven’t been announced, however, and neither has release, though it’ll be this year.
Like fuck it is, you haven’t even announced a release date yet. it’s set to release in 2011.
3. Star Wars: The Old Republic
Admittedly, I know fuck all about this one. I’m not a Star Wars fan, though I find the universe about as interesting as any other nerd. The only thing I really know about TOR is that it’s trying to make the story more important to the average MMO player, and it wants to make the MMO experience more cinematic in general. While I can absolutely get behind the first, I think the second is a colossally stupid idea. There has got to be some way to deliver story to the player without breaking them out of the game, so to speak. People play MMOs more for the social interaction than they do for the story. Having a cut scene pop up every ten seconds and interfere conversations going on in guild chat sounds a hell of a lot more annoying than cool. Aion does this, but in a very limited capacity, so it never gets as annoying as it could, and I still don’t like it. At least they’re trying to deliver story in a way other than “enormous blocks of text for your inventory” like BioWare does in every other game they’ve ever made. (I’m looking at you, Dragon Age: Origins.)
And what the hell is with all the Old Republic crap anyway? Doesn’t it bother anyone else that they know that everything they do in-game will amount to fuck all because it takes place BEFORE the movie canon?
No beta dates are set for this one yet, but a little birdie told me it’s supposed to be out in the spring of 2011.
Thank you, 4chan.
4. Warhammer 40,000 Online
Yes, this is a game we know even less about than we do the nature of the universe, but I don’t give a shit. This may just be one of the games I’ll have to break my “sci-fi MMOs are stupid” rule for, depending on the info we get on it throughout development, of course. The 40k universe is one of those rare gems that manages to be interesting while still being the shittiest place to live ever. The potential is there for great PvP, RP and storytelling, but it’s far too early to say anything yet. Thankfully it’s not being done by Mythic (the people who did Warhammer Online), so fans of WAR may be able to move on to this game without too much fear.
The thing I’m worried most about with this game is that while I love the setting, it’s hard for me to want to roleplay in such a crapsack world. Write a story set in it? Absolutely, but to RP I want to have some sort of connection to my character. Even if they’re a complete jerk, I still have to like them. In a world where everyone is canonically evil, that may be hard for me to do.
The release date is currently set sometime in FY 2012, so it’s a far way away.
5. Other Shit
Yes, there are other games coming out and others that have been announced, but these are the ones at the forefront of my mind at the moment. If you want to bring one to my attention, you can tell me about it in the comments. Chances are I won’t be interested, but you can always try.
Speaking of the comments, thanks to some pretty retarded spam I’ve been getting lately, from now on comments will be moderated per author. That means once you’ve posted here you’ll be green-lit, but your first one may take a while to show up. I don’t particularly care if this bothers you and can’t promise I’ll get to moderating your shit right away, but I will get to it eventually.
Flame away!
In the comments to my last entry, I learned something amazing: I apparently have fans. Or something resembling fans, at the very least. People I don’t know read this shit, mostly thanks to Chuck, because everyone and their mom reads his blog. Or at least, they should. Anyway, I guess it behooves me to actually update this thing on something resembling a schedule, then. I’ll see how many updates I can get out this week, but I’m aiming for three.
Now that I’m done congratulating myself, I do actually have shit to write about, namely Chrono Trigger.
This image is a textbook case of Did Not Do The Research.
I’m not quite sure how old I was the first time I played this game. I think I was between 10 and 13; whatever it was, it feels like a lifetime ago. It’s also been a very long time since I last played it when the PSX version came out, so when Josh gave the DS version to me for Christmas I was pretty psyched to get to play it again. It’s been a strange combination of a trip down memory lane and deja vu; so many subtle things (and some less subtle things) have been changed that I get the feeling that some things in the dialogue are off, somehow, but I can’t exactly describe how. It’s been too long for me to remember exact dialogue so everything just feels weird, but still so familiar. All together it’s not a bad feeling; I actually like the changes they’ve made to the dialogue overall, especially where Frog’s awful medieval accent are concerned.
Anyway, I do have a point in all this. Here are some things I’ve noticed in my latest play through that I want to address, in convenient list format because they make me organised and shit.
1. Half-remembering is worse than being a noob. This might be a consequence of my getting older, but there have been a few times (at least twice I can think of) where what I think is supposed to happen has actually gotten in the way of my progressing through the game. The most obvious are a) Denadoro Mountain in 600 BC, where I thought I needed Frog on my party to get the Masamune, and b) Lavos, where my knowledge of the tactics on the Lavos Core led to IN THE END, THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE. If I was going through this game for the first time, this wouldn’t have been an issue because I would have just kept on doing what I was doing, not expecting certain things to happen. It’s interesting how knowing what’s to come kept fucking me over, which I’d like to think as a big ol’ allegory for time travel in general.
2. Holy homoeroticism Batman. Was the Cyruss/Glenn subtext that obvious in the SNES version? I actually fucking cried during Frog’s flashback immediately prior to the Magus battle and I’ve never done that before.
3. They did not, in fact, ruin it by changing it. The fanboys who think the DS version is worse than any of the previous versions should fuck off and die, seriously. If you don’t want to do the extra content you don’t need to do it. If you want to pretend Chrono Cross never happened you can go ahead and do that too. I also hate the people who say that the extra side quests ruined it because the original game “had no unnecessary side quests”, despite that being blatantly false. Does making the mayor of Porre not a complete dick ring a bell? I thought so. The changes to the dialogue were all decent, too, as I’ve always thought the SNES era of JRPGs suffered a bit from Disneyfication, which is why I’ve always liked the PSX generation more, despite so many bleating sheep claiming the “best games ever” were for the SNES.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that this cover is a massive fucking spoiler?
4. Chrono Cross is still just as good. I’ve gotten a lot of shit from my fellow gamers over the years because ever since I played Chrono Cross for the first time, I thought it was better than Chrono Trigger. I’ve always liked a mindfuck of a complicated storyline, and Chrono Cross provides one of epic proportions. Since I actually just went through my second full play-through of Chrono Cross in September, I feel like I can judge the two games against each other better than I have before, and I will concede that the two are at least as good as each other. Again, I think the fact that reading Frog’s lines isn’t as painful helps with this. Also, playing through Chrono Cross again gave me a better framing device to look at it critically, and I have to admit that the last boss was entirely unnecessary. The plot of that game works well enough without it, so, no, I don’t think it would collapse under its own weight if the Time Devourer were removed or something.
5. Game soundtracks don’t get much better than this. I’ve always thought this, but man, listening to it again is just… All that is good about nostalgia. When I’m rich and powerful I’m going to have Yasunori Mitsuda compose my own personal soundtrack that will accompany me at all times, like in that one episode of Family Guy.
6. Time travel is great, so long as you don’t think about it. This is one of my pet peeves that tends to piss people off because they don’t like being told that there’s no way to do time travel without someone pointing out all the massive paradoxes it would create. I think time travel as a plot device is fascinating. Apparently most of the world does too, since it’s been used in sci-fi and fantasy since the dawn of fire, but really, it’s one of those things that only works if you don’t think about it. As anyone who isn’t an idiot should know, when you’re writing a story the last thing you want is for it to only work if the audience shuts their brains off, but people willing do this for the sake of time travel all the time. Magic doesn’t bother me because it’s, well… Magical. Using magic (or even technology if it’s explained well enough) to travel through time isn’t what bothers me, it’s the fact that you can change things without the universe collapsing on itself over all the paradoxes that does. One thing I like about Chrono Trigger is that, with the exception of the one Lucca scene, you never go back into the characters’ pasts, which — in theory — helps solve some of the more unsightly problems with time travel.
On a note related to time travel: why the fuck hasn’t there been an MMO based on it? I may rag on it but it’s only because I love the concept so much and want to see it done well, which it usually isn’t. WoW’s Caverns of Time are about all that’s out there off the top of my head, especially in mainstream games, and the whole point of it is to avoid changing history. Snore. Someone should make an MMO based offChrononauts.
Well haven’t I been a lazy shit lately. I was on a roll, sort of, updating regularly (again, sort of), and then I had to write about Aion and put it off as long as possible. Which, when you think about it, is pretty stupid seeing as I started this blog to talk about Aion. To be frank, though, I haven’t played it in weeks. I’ve been far too busy, what with play Chrono Trigger, watching Battlestar Galactica, obsessing about what I will do when I finally go to university, and sleeping. Like I said, busy.
An Aionic depiction of how busy I’ve been.
In the last few weeks, I’ve barely even thought about Aion, other than to realise that I didn’t cancel my sub in time so I have a full month left and no desire to play, and about how pointless this website is if I don’t bother playing the damn thing once in a while. (I also spend no time thinking about run-on sentences.) As I have mentioned before I had no real intention of quitting. I honestly thought I’d get over my lack of motivation and go back to that gorgeous world, especially since I’ve not really played much since I started this blog. But I haven’t.
The real reasons for this aren’t really related to the game itself; people leaving, people switching sides, my own switching sides and my desire to do things with Josh are the most prominent things keeping me away from MMO-land. There are some problems with the game, it isn’t perfect, but I don’t think it’s as bad as everyone thought. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll do another list like with EQ2 because they make me feel all organised and shit.
The Good
1. Launch. Fuck everyone who says Aion had a terrible launch, you’re all retards. I actually had an argument with a guy about this at a Halloween party I went to, it pisses me off so much. So, you pre-ordered the game. So did everyone else. No one cares that you’d been waiting “forever” for the game to go live; so had they. Complaining that it’s hard to do what you want to do because everyone else wants to do it too makes you a douche. After they added the servers Fregion and Meslamtaeda most people shut up, but not all. Christ I hate fans.
2. The classes. I found the classes fun and interesting, and appreciated how few of them there were. They weren’t completely balanced — the chanter in any solo PvP situation comes to mind — but they were better than any other PvP game I’ve seen. The only real downside is that your choices are limited (by which I of course mean “limited to one”) if you want to be a healer or tank.
3. NC’s response to gold spammers. Most people will accuse you of being an enormous fangirl/fanboy if you say anything positive about NC, but really, I think their response was fairly quick and did a damn good job. It wasn’t perfect, but even WoW has sporadic periods of gold spammers reemerging.
4. The graphics. You can’t really talk about Aion without mentioning how gorgeous it is, but fuck me is it ever.
5. The roleplaying. No, not all of it was fantastic, but unlike the experiences of the Classholes Anonymous gang over on the Asmodian side, Elyos-side, I found a lot more good (or at least decent and fun) than I did bad. The late night crew I hung with was especially awesome and entertaining, and no one freaked out about me being a bitch because my character was, so that’s a step in the right direction.
The Bad
1. Bots. As I just mentioned, gold spammers were dealt with, but by the time I stopped playing regularly bots hadn’t been as much. That isn’t to say I thought they wouldn’t be; unlike most of the whining dipshits out there I am a patient person for the most part. Given NC’s response to the gold sellers after so many people cried that “nothing’s being done”, I had — and still have — full confidence that something will be done about the bots. They’re annoying, but I never took their presence quite as personally as some people did.
2. The grind. Apparently more is being done to alleviate this, but even at lower levels some of this starts to poke through.
3. Roleplayers. While I said the RP was mostly good, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t bad. Most of the bad I experienced was directly from the ARP forums, though most of the discussions were engaging and the stories interesting. At first the group of RPers I knew had its share of bads and Mary Sues, but they mostly got filtered out as they quit the game, switching to Asmo for “better RP”, or just stopped joining the E-OOC channel because we were all elitist pricks. You win some, you lose some. In that case I won and they lost.
The Ugly
I feel like there’s just so much more that I could say. I had been putting off writing this post, originally, because I wanted to play the game again before I went and updated so I could kind of frame my opinions in a more recent experience, but I just have no motivation. And I still need to kill Lavos, and that’s higher on my priority list. Don’t worry, loyal readers, when/if I play again you’ll be the first to know. If I switch to another game or give up MMOing for a while in general, you’ll know too. That’s the wonderful thing about blogging, you see.
Actually, you’ll be the second to know. The first to know will be my fellow twats on Twatter Twitter. You should add me.
A big ol’ happy 2010, loyal readers! Let’s continue my self indulgent retrospective into 2009 with some games I played for relatively short periods of time last year: EverQuest II and Warhammer Online.
Dwarf chicks do, in fact, have beards.
I started playing EQ2 at the end of January last year and stopped mid-April. There were a few things I liked, but there were quite a few I didn’t, hence the short stay.
The Good:
1. The sheer amount of PvE in the game was impressive. I played a warden and only had to quest when I wanted to gather materials for crafting. I could have PuGed my way to level cap if I’d had the patience.
2. The crafting. I loved that it was more than just “set PC to make 500 sticks, AFK to make a sandwich”. It was somewhat tedious but if I wanted something dynamic and fast-paced I probably wouldn’t enjoy MMOs, now, would I?
The Bad:
1. The RP community. Holy fuck is it awful. There are some diamonds-in-the-rough, so to speak, and I RPed like every day I was there, but never anything all that substantial. The people who my guildmates had substantial RP with were all invariably werewolf vampires so I tried to steer clear of anything all that serious anyway.
2. One of the reasons the RP was so god-awful was because the lore for the game was either lacking, crap, poorly written, or inaccessible. There were some interesting concepts in there, but they were buried under terrible prose and dialogue trees with wrong answers (a mortal sin in MMOs).
3. No PvP on any RP server. The only RPPVP server was Venekor, which has since been shut down because RPers are all carebears and avoid PvP servers like the fucking plague.
4. PvE was very samey; there was little variation between bosses in a dungeon, and little besides scenery changed between dungeons. I actually quit when I realised I’d gained an Achievement Point in a dungeon without even noticing because the boss was seriously that much like the regular ol’ Joe Schmoe mobs.
The Ugly:
1. The character models, especially for humans. What the fuck were they thinking? The way the water looks in comparison to WoW’s makes it seem amazing that they came out in the same year, but the character models point out that yes, the game is old as fuck. Sure, you can change them to the alternate models if you want, but they all look like awful anime characters. My main was a wood elf, anyway, and they looked awful in both models (though not as bad as the humans). Some of the newer races, like the fae/arasai fairies, look decent, but goddamn.
2. EQ2Flames. Ah, yes, how can anyone talk about EQ2 without mentioning the cesspit that is EQ2Flames? To be fair, I visited this place like every day when I actually played the game because I love it. I think internet drama is hilarious and am a semi-regular visitor of 4chan, what did you expect? There’s useful information on there, too, if you can sort through all the crap. I have to laugh at people who think AionSource is full of trolls; it’s the epitome of politeness compared to this. It’s even spawned its own Encyclopedia Dramatica pages, which I won’t link to because the ads on that site are usually full of tits. Look it up if you’re curious.
Overall, my stay in Norrath was too short to really get much out of it other than that. I never got to endgame, but from what I heard, I don’t know if I’d have cared to. While I’m vehemently opposed to Blizzard changing WoW’s lowbie areas in lieu of new endgame, I think Sony’s efforts to update some of the lower-level zones in EQ2 is admirable. Now if only they’d update some of the dungeons so they didn’t suck, people would actually be interested in making it to the endgame.
Speaking of games people lost interest in quickly, the game I played right after EQ2 was a much better experience, but not much better game: Warhammer Online.
This game wasn’t pretty, but she sure was fun.
Now, I’m not going to go over what I did and didn’t like about it as thoroughly as I just did with EQ2 (which wasn’t really thorough at all, but whatever). Any criticism I could give this game has already been given a million times over, by people who played it longer, waited for it with more anticipation, and generally put more into it than I did. Really, that isn’t what I want to say, anyway. When I think about games like WoW, I’m filled with an uncontrollable rage at how a company can ruin something by trying to please everyone. When I think about WAR, I’m filled with nothing but sadness.
The very talented JH Jacobs over at LAWL RP wrote a post about this recently, and I think you should read it if you want to know what I mean. WAR had so much going for it and just… fell flat on its face, and this shouldn’t upset me quite so much, but it does. Lots of games fail, and most of them deserve it. WAR deserved it, but in my short time playing it I saw the potential for just.. so much more. If I were to make an MMO, I’d borrow so much from WAR it’d probably need to be made by Mythic or I’d be sued. Large-scale PvP that showed people it could be about things other than ganking (and not to mention lowbie scenarios… those were ridiculously addictive), amazing lore with a strong RP community, fun and challenging small-group dungeons… All of these are things I look for in MMOs, and have been trying to find since WAR. Aion is fun, but if WAR had succeeded I’d be playing it instead, no doubt about it.
Now that I’ve thoroughly depressed myself, here’s something unrelated to make myself feel better.
Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
Next time… Aion!
P.S.: Oh, a quick update: I’m now on Twitter, so you should follow me. Twitter may be just about the most potentially retarded thing on the internet today, but it’s also the easiest way to keep up with shit. Like blogs you might read, like, say, for example… this one.
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