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Stuck on a Path

Gaming

Last post on the challenges of the single character problem was about how to let players learn characters without forcing them to invest hours and hours just to discover they don’t like it. But what about people who did test, liked what they saw, but then later something changed (their tastes, their available time, whatever) and now the character they have is one they don’t, won’t or can’t play?

In current MMOs, once you make the character that character is stuck. A warrior is a warrior. In a game like World of Warcraft you can fine tune the warrior with talents and even built very distinct warriors. They even allow you the ability to re-pick your talents any time (for a price), but you’ll still be a warrior. Your warrior cannot become a warlock or a hunter. Alternate characters are the only option. City of Heroes works the same way: a blaster is a blaster. In fact, a fire/devices blaster is a fire/devices blaster. You can’t change power sets, you have to start over.

Now, realistically, this makes sense. I mean, if you spend your whole life learning one set of skills, you can’t just up and decide that you would have rather spent that time doing something else and magically make that happen. But then, these games are not reality. More games should allow you to make changes, even drastic changes, to your character without losing your identity. If I spend two years in a game playing Joeblow the warrior, making friends, joining a guild, earning a reputation as Joeblow, why am I forced to start completely over when I want to experience something different in the game? Some games try to get around this, like City of Heroes implementing their global chat names, but that only hides the problem. Sure, you may know that I’m ProbablyNot in the global channels, but in game I’m Ishiro Takagi or Jhaer Snow or John Hellstrom or Calvin Meeks. My reputation becomes much harder to translate.

Lets take World of Warcraft as an example and expand on it. As I mentioned earlier, they do let you rebuild your talents. But why not let you re-spend your experience points? Now, I’m not suggesting allowing 100% free anytime character rebuilding. They already have the precedent of paying for talent resets, just make a new NPC who asks for money based on level for picking a new class. Would it really break the game to allow a level 70 Paladin pay 1,000 or even 2,000 gold to become a level 70 Warrior? Of course, if you were a gnome, you’d be restricted to gnome classes since the game restricts like that already. Allowing a gnome shaman might be game, if not just lore, breaking. But then, why not allow the player to pay 5,000 gold to switch races (restricted to those which allow his class)? Not only would this allow for players to play the character they want without starting over, it would also introduce new money sinks into the game, and games, especially those that keep expanding, can always use new desirable yet optional money sinks.

You could even, if there was a demand for it, allow people to strip themselves back to level 1. Even pay them for it. The warlocks need to power their machines with life-force, they’ll strip 69 levels from a level 70 player and pay him X gold. With that money a player could take their level 1, pay to change his class and/or race and level back up again, tread-milling the same character, the same name, over and over again, with reward, as opposed to alternate characters or deleting and restarting.

Following a similar model, most games could introduce this kind of mechanic. As long as the change had a price of some sort and was limited by location (must visit particular NPCs), the only real downside I can see would be players less likely to stick with classes or builds they feel are broken, which could increase developer knowledge of a problem’s existence, but might decrease the pool of incoming data to be able to properly examine it.

So, what say you?

Cheating

Gaming

Last week, Raph Koster laid down an analysis of why strategy guides are cheating. He contends that playing the game is what you are supposed to do, and anything outside of playing the game is a form of cheating.

I agree. Raph says:

… RPGs do not give you the location of every spawn in advance, the stats on every weapon in advance, the solution to every quest in advance, and so on. For a reason. Finding the spawn, discovering the stats, solving the quest is part of the game.

Now,we may argue that this part of the game is tedious (“why should I have to click all over the screen to find the hotspot??” is exactly like “why should I have to traipse all over this dungeon to find the specific kobold!”). We may say that the game would be “better” if it provided you a waypoint directly to that location. But that is beside the point – the game chose to hide this info from you, therefore you are not supposed to have it, and having it is cheating.

Any info you get that isn’t presented to you by the game in normal gameplay sequence is not supposed to be available to you.

This is how I felt as I played through Ultima Online and EverQuest. I avoided strategy guides and spoiler sites as much as humanly possible. Most often when I did resort to hitting the web for EQ, it was because I was certain that I was right given all the information in the game but it wasn’t working, and probably 99.9% of the time, I was right and the game was broken. I felt immersed in those games because I was always “in” those games. Sure, I’d pop out and read some message boards and rant sites from time to time, but usually those times were to seek out other people trying to discuss and figure out the hidden information. Theorizing and learning.

In any event, however, my ability to play the game was never hampered by not going to spoiler sites. Everything I needed to play the game was in the game. As time has gone on though, some games have gotten so horribly vague with their in game information that parts of the game are practically unplayable without going to look at a strategy guide of some sort. When a quest giver says “south of the big rock” and that area encompasses miles while you are searching for inches, that is just silly. Making a player wander around aimlessly to waste time is bad design. Would it have killed the developers to say “south of the big rock near a cluster of orange leaved trees”, cutting the search time down from hours (even days) to a more manageable thirty minutes at most?

Following the comments on Raph’s post and after seeing similar discussions elsewhere, I keep seeing the same defense, and it leads directly to what I just stated above, games are beginning to suck in their ability to provide players with what they need to play the game AND keep that play enjoyable. To which I can only say, as I did over on Raph’s, if you find yourself unable to play and enjoy a game without using a strategy guide or spoiler site, you should not reward the developer by continuing to pay for their game.

Hello 2008!

Random Thoughts

Last night we said goodbye to 2007, and good riddance. Not that 2007 did anything wrong, but come on, who wants some old year hanging around when we’ve got a nice shiny new year sitting right here!

Looking back 365 days at the welcoming of 2007, lets examine how my predictions and premonitions worked out…

First, I’m still using electronic billing for everything but my garbage collection, so I can look forward to another smooth date transition as again I won’t be writing enough checks to accidentally keep writing the wrong year on.

Next, I said I’d eat better… and I have… a little… I get salads when we eat out sometimes, and I’m eating more fruits and veggies. Overall, I’ve shed ten pounds that I’ve managed to keep off in the last year. Yeah, I’m still pushing the needle on the scale over to the “hefty” side, but it doesn’t go as far as it used to. Another few years of this and I’ll be positively svelte!

Onward… MMOs and computers… I did actually cave and got new PCs for the wife and I. I did buy the WoW expansion, and messed around with it. I played the Vanguard beta, and it sucked. I bought a Wii. I bought a 360. And I am, in fact, pretty much done with the PC as a gaming platform, sort of. I canceled all my MMO subscriptions and nothing on the horizon is blowing my skirt up. I apply to every beta that I can and I participate in those trying to help them make a better game, but in the end they all end up not interesting me enough for me to make the buy. The MMO I’m most playing right now is actually Urban Dead which is about as far from WoW as you can get without actually dialing up a BBS to play TradeWars 2002 (which is officially 6 years ago now… where is my intergalactic trade federation? huh? when I see a Presidential candidate address that issue, I’ll know who to vote for). For my fantasy gaming fix, my bi-weekly group has continued to meet and our campaigns progress quite nicely. They may not be massively multiplayer, but they sure are more fun than the current slate of MMOs.

Lots of superhero books did come out, almost all of them for established comic book characters, and I didn’t finish any of my own projects.

I said that the business front was “looking pretty good”, my exact words. The key word here turned out to be “looking”. I’ve come to realize that a person whom I have always believed was only smoke and mirrors is in fact only smoke and mirrors, in a manner of speaking, his machinations and manipulations in the end are much ado about nothing. I keep pressing the Escape key, but I’m still here.

So… what does 2008 look like from here, the first day of the year?

S.O.S.

Same Old Shit, ladies and gentlemen. I suspect in 2008 I will write even less checks (garbage company might start taking credit soon), I will manage to drop another ten pounds (at least), I will continue to play betas but not buy MMOs (I’m pretty sure all the games I might buy will get delayed to 2009 anyway), I will play console games (the ones I already play and new ones coming out all the time, why, the Christmas season alone has produced a good eight or nine games I don’t own that I want to play), there will be more superhero books and business will continue to “look good” while actually being anything but (although, this year as new budgets are approved and hiring goes into higher gears I’m actually working with a recruiter, the only one recently to actually get me interviews).

New resolutions? I resolve to actually rake the yard (provided Georgia lifts its burn ban so I can dispose of the leaves myself, bagging sucks). I resolve to finish building the bar (we have the cabinets, now we just need to put them in and make the counter tops). And I resolve to stop buying crap I don’t need (seriously, I spend too much money on stuff when I should focus on convincing other people to buy it and then lend it to me). I’d make more resolutions, but then I will feel worse when I fail to do them all.

Oh, and if somehow Fred Thompson actually becomes President, I’ll eat my hat… and then I’ll begin weekly posts about how he should just round up Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell, Jack Ryan, Ray Levoi, John McClane, and the Law & Order guys and go straighten out all this Middle East stuff. But that is the extent of my campaign promises…

So, welcome 2008! Please don’t hit me in the junk!

Goodbye 2007

Random Thoughts

This is where we look back at the year and see how we did…

… or not.

In the grand scheme of things, unless I have set in motion unseen events that will lead to the destruction of mankind or its salvation, not much of anything important happened to me personally in 2007. Although, I dare say, this year, this blog has taken on a more cohesive shape, and I hope to continue that and expand that to the root website in the coming year.

All in all, in my corner of the world, things have been smooth sailing.

Goodbye 2007…

Keeping Track

Site News

A long time ago, I picked up a plugin for WordPress called Now Reading and it was good. But then I ran into two issues: 1) My webspace provider had my PHP locked at 8MB of memory for processing, and 2) An upgrade of WordPress came out that broke something.

I forget what broke, but I just remember getting annoyed, and then the 8MB limit started hitting me alot and I had to start dropping plugins. Now Reading was one that didn’t make the cut, and I started just doing my own book selection by hand.

Well, my provider finally started allowing me to up the memory on the PHP and so I began looking to add back in a few plugins. I came across Now Reading again thanks to Kevin, and its been updated and fixed and whatever that I can use it again. Anyway, I spent the last few days digging out my reading history and updating the plugin and I’ll be using it from here on out.

You’ll see it over on the right, there it’ll show the book or books I’m currently reading along with the last few books I’ve finished, and a link to the library that will show all the books I’ve read since about April of 2005. Its not completely accurate because I’m using my book reviews on the blog here to make the list and there were a few books I didn’t review.

Anyway, now that its there I should be able to keep track of my book a week adventure. We’ll see how that goes…

P.S. I Love You

Reviews

13 out of 13 nots
for making me weep little man tears

Unlike other reviews, this one won’t be a two parter, there will be nothing after the break, there will be no break. The story is this: a man and a woman love each other, but they also fight a lot, until he gets a brain tumor and dies, and somehow through a myriad different ways he has arranged for his widow to receive letters he has written, about one a month, each as a step in a plan to make sure she continues her life now that he’s gone.

This is the first perfect 13 out of 13 I’ve given and its because I really do feel that this movie is that extraordinary. It is funny, and loving, and heart warming, and it hurts. Everyone in the movie gives an outstanding performance and for something that I thought would be another throwaway chick flick my wife would drag me to, I am simply floored at how it managed to move me.

The only drawback to this film is that now if I go first, my wife will expect her series of letters… better get to work then. 🙂

And wife, if you read this… P.S. I love you.

The Stupidest Angel

Reviews

Keeping with the Zombie Wednesday theme and considering the time of year, I thought I’d throw out an old style review (no rating) of a book I read before I started reviewing books on the site: The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore.

If you have read other books by Christopher Moore, you’ll see lots of familiar faces here. In fact, I think characters from every book up to the release of this one are in it. But that’s beside the point, if you don’t know the characters you can still enjoy the book, there just may be a sentence or two that doesn’t make as much sense to you as it would to someone who has read all the books.

The story here is about an angel named Raziel. If you’ve read Lamb, you’ll know he’s the one who showed up late, by a few years, to explain to Joshua that he was the son of God and what he was supposed to do. Anyway, the angel comes to town to grant one Christmas wish. The child he picks happens to have witnessed a murder earlier, and the victim, a power hungry developer, was dressed as Santa Claus. So the child’s wish is to have Santa brought back to life. Since “Santa” was unceremoniously dumped into a grave in the graveyard, the angel goes and brings him, and because he’s not careful the other corpses, back to life. The zombies then decide to eat the entire town of Melancholy Cove.

Zombies, Christmas and comedy. You just can’t go wrong.

Anyway, the book is a delight to read and totally worth the money to pick up a copy. I only regret not reviewing it sooner, and not getting to it before Christmas so people might get one and enjoy it snuggled up in their beds on Christmas Eve. There’s always next year…

Tis the Season

Random Thoughts

Or perhaps it isn’t.

I can’t help but think that something is missing this year. Of course, as with every year since her passing, I miss my mother. She really enjoyed Christmas time. And I have lamented before about the lack of Christmas TV programming, specifically It’s A Wonderful Life being shown nine million times on seventy channels.

But this year, there is something else missing… It seems that even though people dislike thinking of Christmas as a commercial holiday full of spending money, they’ve also managed to suck everything but the commerce out of it. I was at a mall last week and they weren’t playing holiday music, not even the old classical stuff, and they didn’t have much in the way of decorations at all. A few stores had up some bows or snowflakes, but the mall itself was clear of holiday cheer. The grocery stores all look the same as they do any other day of the year, as do the Target’s and Wal-Marts. Best Buy has adopted a gift logo for general use, so even though it might appear they’ve got “present” decorations up, it is really just their every day stuff. At restaurants, nothing indicates that any celebration might be going on, except maybe the occasional wreath.

Luckily, many of my neighbors, myself included, put out lights and other decorations… but many is less than half, and once I leave the neighborhood it becomes a rare occurrence to see anything in the spirit of the season that isn’t directly selling something.

Lots of people I know say they are having trouble getting into the spirit, and to me at least its easy to see why.

I suppose it might be considered insensitive to want to see more celebration of my chosen holiday… but isn’t it also insensitive to want to see less celebration of someone else’s chosen holiday? I really don’t care… I want to see more of everyone celebrating however they choose to celebrate it.

Anyway… I’m off to observe my holiday traditions… a bunch of nothing today, followed by a late night snacky supper (sandwiches with all the fixin’s), a fitful sleep, breakfast and presents over at Dad’s house in the morning, and a misfits family Christmas dinner at night.

So here’s to you, in all that you do, whatever you are up to. Merry Christmas!

Enjoy!

A Party of One

Gaming

Of late I have been fooling around in Guild Wars. I’ve long been interested in the game because of its “no monthly fee” design, and because of a little idea called “henchmen”.

All throughout my table top gaming days, whenever we needed a class, skill, or knowledge that the player characters did not possess, we would head on down to the local bars, adventurer guilds, docks or slave markets to find what we needed. So when getting into MMOs, at first, the idea that I needed to group with other people for everything was strange. Standing around waiting to find a healer because we needed one seemed like a waste of time. I eventually got over it and made friends and tried to make sure I always had a group. But increasingly over the last half dozen or so years, perhaps because I’m turning into the grouchy old man yelling at the kids to stay off his lawn, I’m just not as inclined as I used to be to put up with the Internet toddlers who like to “pwn” and “lol” and “zorz” their way through conversations. So, playing World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and Villains, Lord of the Rings Online, I would group with the people I already knew and maybe the occasional non-infantile gamer I ran across. But more often than not, I would solo.

I’m still soloing in Guild Wars (my wife injured her hand and hasn’t been much for gaming this month), but when I’m about to leave town and hit the quests, I’ll snag myself a couple or three henchmen. Just as in my table top games, these people aren’t the brightest bulbs in the pack. I play a mage, and so I’ll load up with a fighter, a ranger and a healer, and they do exactly as their class suggests. The fighter charges in and fights, the ranger stands back and shoots, and the healer heals. In fact, that’s all they do. The fighter will stand and fight until he dies, he doesn’t run. The ranger shoots, at any range. And the healer heals, if a monster hits her, she runs around like a chicken with its head cut off until the threat is over. I’ve heard there are better henchmen, but I’m only level 7 and my henchmen are level 3, plus I only own the original Prophesies game, none of the expansions, so either I haven’t gotten to the better ones yet, or I am incapable of getting to them.

Overall though, I’m liking the whole henchmen system. They don’t replace good players, but they sure beat crappy players. I would love to see something like this implemented in other games. Imagine City of Heroes with “henchmen” style sidekicks, allowing you to change up the game a little while still playing alone if you wanted.

I’d love to hear other people’s opinions and experiences. What do you think about NPC pets and henchmen in games?