Terminally Incoherent

Video game market has two big segments. On one hand we have the console market (Xbox, Playstation, Wii) and the PC market. The console segment is doing great and is constantly growing and going through changes. Wii for example was able to capture whole new demographic for Nintendo (good for them!). PC segment on the other hand…

Well, it’s like this. DRM, DRM, DRM, FUCK YOU YOU THIEVES, YOU ONLY GET 3 ACTIVATIONS! Pretty much like that. Buying a PC game these days is like getting slapped in the face. Hi, thank you for shopping, enjoy your game and **SMACK** that’s for stealing you fucker. If I find my game on the Internets I will come to your house and rape your mom! Understood? Ok, have a great day now.

So we have this never ending debate titled “is PC gaming dead yet?”. I now argued both sides of this discussion. There are plenty of reasons to expect PC gaming to remain vibrant for years to come. On the other hand though, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about it. I’m not going to reproduce these arguments here (go read the relevant posts you lazy bum), I just wanted to point out that there are valid points on both sides. Game market for the PC is still doing well, but that may or may not last.

Some people say good riddance. These folks gave up on video gaming on their PC, uninstalled Windows (I hope, I mean what other possible reason than gaming would you have to keep that horrid OS on your machine) and nowadays do their gaming from their living room couch. They tell me they are happier this way. They don’t need to deal with DRM, they can actually share their games with friends, rent them, or even sell them after they get bored. Selling video games! Imagine that. I almost forgot that this is even possible. I don’t own consoles, and I’m pretty used to the fact that games these days are locked so tight you can’t even play them on your PC.

These folks can actually go and buy used games at like half the price. Hah! We can’t even return the game back to the store if we don’t like it. But I do remember that I owned a PS1 back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and I did get bunch of brand new (less than 6 months old) games for practically nothing from the used game bin.

Perhaps the grass is indeed greener on the other side?

But it’s not. When you buy a console, you enter a locked down proprietary, tightly controlled environment. That means no mods, no trainers and no indy stuff. There is virtually no such thing as open video game engines and getting the Development Kit usually involves paying large sum of money, and swearing an oath of silence and non-disclosure. It is a very different environment to live in, and one that sort of frightens me.

Oh, and you know that awesome, vibrant second sale market for console games I talked about? You know, the fact you can buy used games dirt cheap, or sell your collection back to the store when you get sick of it? Well, the big boys out there have plans to seriously undercut it. You can read the slashdot article (or the original one if you want to be rebellious and prove you are not just another slashbot) but let me reproduce the gist of it here:

You buy a game and you get an activation code. You need to use this code to unlock parts of the game at which point it binds it to your console. But it’s not like the PC online activation crap. Oh no, these guys are so much nicer about it. They will even allow you to sell it back. It’s just that the next person won’t be able to play the locked parts of the game which might be, oh - I don’t know - the final boss. Or maybe everything but the first level. If you buy a used copy and want access to the locked parts you will simply have to go online and buy your own activation code for a modest price (eg. the price of a brand new game).

In other words, the console game developers re-discovered the shareware distribution model and are planning to use it to make the second sale market, which was bothering them since the day one, disappear.

So don’t tell me the life in the fairy tale land of consoles is so awesome. The game companies on that side of the fence are as greedy and as deranged as on this side. They just haven’t figured out the best way to rip you off yet. So the ball is in your court. Will you let them do this? Of course you will. It’s like telling PC gamers to boycott games because of DRM. Everyone agrees and then runs to the store to get the game, or downloads it. Sigh…

Am I surprised? Not at all. I sort of seen it comming. This trend started long time ago around the time when Bethsheda came up with the horse armor mod for Oblivion. I could not believe the actually planned to sell this stuff. Who would buy it? After all, you can make your own fucking horse armor in the editor. And then I realized that Xbox version ships with no editor and won’t let you use mods. Crafty, I thought. Very crafty. I wonder when this sort of thing becomes a norm. It seems that this time is coming soon.

It seems that no matter which segment of the video game market you belong to you will end up being fucked. I don’t get it. Where is this hostility towards customers coming from. This shit would never fly in any other place other than our little video game ghetto. Oh wait. Never mind. Music and movie industries are pulling stuff like that too, quite successfully lately. What is going on here?

Why do we let these companies fuck us over and over again. Why do we allow them to treat us like shit? What is it about digital goods that makes us believe that their behavior is justified? Because, let’s face it. It is our fault. We are allowing this to happen by giving these people our money. Can we stop? Please?

Hey, have you heard about that world. That world of war and craft? Yeah, I’m sick of that world. I’m getting out. I seriously haven’t launched WoW in probably over a month now and I feel no urge to. I think my adventure with that game is over. Damn it, I’m an antisocial beast. I have no clue what made me think I could play a game populated by millions of other human beings and not wish they would all die and rot in hell, and get the fuck of my game. I mean there were times I had fun teaming up with other people but usually I was just hoping that all these friendly people just fuck off.

Often if someone wanted to talk to me I would pretend that I didn’t speak Orkish and just type stuff in the Troll language, then use the /confused emote when they responded, wave, bow and run off to do my thing. I’m being social at work, then I come home and I’m being social with my family, and then I sit down at my desk to be social with some random assholes in WoW? I think not. My brain gets totally pissed off if it doesn’t get it’s daily quota of sweet solitude. It was plain to see that I was not getting all out of WoW because my general dislike of chatty online strangers who want to team up and run instances all the time. If you take the social aspect out of WoW the game essentially turns into a Diablo like running game that involves running around and killing things. There are some plesant diversions such as collectibles, minigames, achievements and etc. But in the end, your daily grind usually boils down too running from one area to the other and killing X of Y. There is nothing wrong with that, but I have been spoiled by RPG games with real depth to them.

You know, games which will actually allow you to play a thief and level up by stealing, fencing and trading, without really needing to commit any bloodshed. I’m talking about Morrowind of course - that one game that keeps drawing me back in over and over again due to it’s immense replay value. The great thing about Morrowind is the sheer variety of quests you will get just by doing side missions unrelated to the main storyline. One day you are spying on someone, next day you are stealing secret documents, later you are sent to negotiate trade agreement and etc.. You can easily level up and advance your character without ever needing to kill anything.

Yes, you can play a pacifist in WoW too but it is not easy. It is actually quite difficult, if not impossible to achieve without serious commitment to the cause. If you are doing it, you might as well start a blog about it and people will read it because it is such an unusual (and strangely awesome) thing to do. In games such as Morrowind and Oblivion, a semi-pacifistic life style can simply a logical outcome of you choosing your character class. If you rolled a thief or a rogue you will be doing missions that require stealth, good speechcraft and security skills (stealing, extortion, burglary, pick pocketing) rather than the heavily combat oriented stuff. And there is nothing unusual or blog-worthy in that. It’s just how that game works.

Part of it is of course the fact that Morrowind and Oblivion have fairly complex system of rules that allow you to train in pick-pocketing, or lock picking and then use these skills in the game. This complex system of attributes, skills, racial/class feats and special abilities is the legacy of the western single player RPG tradition. Computer RPG games inherited it from pen and paper games like D&D which (out of necessity) had to include rules for all this non combat stuff.

Funny thing is that MMO’s break with this tradition. If you are a gamer you know that this is true. And yet someone looking from the outside would be surprised. D&D is social affair isn’t it? You get together with bunch of friends, you drink a gallon of Mountain Dew, eat a bag of Doritos an tell inappropriate jokes while the GM is trying to build tension or whatever. You could almost say that D&D is a multi-player game, could you not? WoW is a multi-player game too. Massively! Sounds like a match too me. But it’s not. Playing WoW is probably as far from playing an actual pen & paper game as you can get. In WoW your stats are limited to bare bones minimum that is required for calculating how hard your character can hit stuff. When you level up, you get almost no choice as to how you can upgrade your character. The skills you learn are mostly special attacks of varying range and/or damage output. You can’t learn lock picking in this game because there are no locks to pick. You can’t use your superior charisma or speachcraft skill to talk your way out of sticky situations because you never actually talk to anyone in this game. Your interaction with NPC’s is limited to taking or turning in quests and not much more.

WoW does have a limited crafting system but you can’t just play a craftsman. In order to excel at your craft (be it smiting, engineering or leather working) you need to go out and kill large quantities of “things” to gain the necessary levels and XP. The crafting system is meant to be a diversion you engage in between missions. The kill X of Y thing seems to be a MMO thing rather than a WoW thing though. It is like a MMO questing paradigm that almost defines the genre.

Is it always like that though? Are there MMO games out there that do not follow this pattern and offer you alternate ways to advance? I know of two counter examples. One of them is Eve Online which I have tried and got bored with pretty quickly. But then again I wouldn’t really call Eve a conventional MMO. I’d probably classify it as a hybrid between Microsoft Excel and Progress Quest - the only other game I can think of, that rewards you for not playing it. But that’s just my opinion and you have to keep in mind that I’m a people hating introvert and when I play MMO’s I actually run away from people that want to team up with me more often than not. If you are a social person, Eve like any other MMO offers you tons of entertainment in the form of guilds (or corporations) and player driven drama.

The other game that used an approach that was closer to single-player games (and thus the pen & paper roots) was Star Wars Galaxies where you used to be able to pick a merchant or an exotic dancer as a class. I never played that game, but I heard both good and bad things about it. All I know is that at some point they decided to overhaul the whole game engine and nerfed it down to the point where it became almost a WoW clone.

Everything else seems to follow the WoW lead, simplifying the stats and game mechanics to the bare bones minimum, and reducing the game play down to a controlled genocide. I can see why this is happening. The “kill X of Y” type missions are easy to write, script and deploy (so you can make them in bulk). Players can easily team up and accomplish these missions together as a team, and the missions are easily repeatable (ie. large mobs do not deplete easily, so players are not sitting around waiting for them to re-spawn all the time). But I can’t help to think that the MMO genre would be richer and deeper if it went back to it’s roots, and added bit more complexity to it’s system in order to allow for some more variety. But that’s me.

I don’t usually go for the casual games but I’m making an exception for World of Gooo. It is a terribly, terribly addictive puzzle game that will suck you in for hours. I totally blame Shamus for bringing it to my attention. I read about it on his page, watched the video, read a review someone linked in comments and was intrigued. So I went and downloaded the demo which is actually the whole Chapter 1 (out of 4) of the game. I grabbed it from FilePlanet but in retrospect it was terrible, terrible idea due to the long queues. Which, actually says something about the game. I downloaded stuff from FilePlanet before (Morrowind mods mostly) and I never had to wait in a queue.

World of Goo Wait time was over 40 minutes for me. I just opened the window and went to make myself some dinner. When I came back the thing downloaded. I launched the game and… Well, needless to say, next thing I knew was that it was 3AM in the morning and I needed to stop messing around with the goo-bals and go to sleep. Well, that and get the full game cause I like totally used up the demo in that time. Seriously.

I highly recommend checking it out, but you will probably want to avoid FilePlanet and use one of the alternate download locations. Either that or just get the Demo via Steam. If I knew there was a Steam version I would never bother with the FilePlanet shit.

What is the object of this game? You build wobbly structures by connecting silly looking balls of goo to get to a hard to reach target. That could be a whole game in itself and it would probably keep you amused for hours. It is a blast just to sit there playing with the physics of connecting the balls and keeping these structures from keeling over. But the game constantly throws in new twists into the gameplay. For example, no two stages in Chapter 1 are alike. You start with simple stuff such as building towers. Then you graduate to building bridges over wide gaps of terrain. You learn how to wedge your structures between walls. You learn how to support them with helium balloons to make even longer, wobblier bridges. There is one level which is a hexagonal tumbler forcing you to build a structure that can be rolled over on it’s side or upside down and still work. Every time you start a new level you can expect to be surprised and challenged in a new, entertaining way.

Unlike many other puzzle games there is no one correct solution for each level. Many other games force you accomplish tasks in particular way, and their puzzles seem like a game of “figure out how the designers want me to do this”. World of Goo is different - the game play is entirely free-form and you never feel like you need to follow specific patterns to succeed. The game gives you hints along the way but it never really prods you or shows you how to do things. You are your own master, and whenever you figure out a way to complete a level while saving more goo-balls you feel immense sense of accomplishment.

All the extra balls you rescue in each level, go into the World of Goo Corporation area which is a sandbox where you can use them to build a tower. There is an online component to this which you can enable. Once you do you will see funky little clouds appear above and below your tower. These signify how tall are the towers created by the other players. So you can have a sort of competition going on with all the other World of Goo folks out there. It’s probably worth adding that you can go back and replay every level at any time you want to see if you can score better (and thus gain more goo-balls for your tower).

The game is visually stunning - the levels are designed astonishingly well, with great attention to detail. Strong art direction gives the game a unique look, which accompanied by the cute sound effects and a lot of humor make for an incredible experience. Not to mention that the game will run on just about anything ranging from a toaster to your high end gaming rig.

It is almost hard to believe that this incredibly polished, detailed and meticulously designed product is an indie game written from scratch by two guys working out of local coffe-shops. Yep, there was no huge dev-team behind this title. Just two dudes with their laptops. Which is all the more reason to give them some of your money right now. At $20 this game is a steal. You won’t regret buying it, unless of course you miss couple of deadlines due to it’s highly addictive nature. Hell, you will feel better about yourself when you buy it knowing that your hard earned cash helped to support two talented independent game developers.

I just wanted to say that I’m officially bored with WoW. I predicted that this will happen, but it took a bit longer than I expected. Remember all these posts I made in which I said how the game continues being interesting despite repetitive game play? Yeah, I’m over that now. Repetition has just became tedious. At this point I’m seriously considering canceling my account. I’m having second thoughts of course. I mean I leveled up this character up to 40 so I don’t really want to just toss him. Blizzard says it will probably save my character for all eternity when I cancel, but they don’t guarantee it. So it’s different from a normal single player RPG game where I can just abandon it for 6 months and as long as I don’t lose my saved game files I can come back to it with no problems. My “saved game” is on Blizzard’s server, and as soon as I stop paying them they don’t really have any incentives to keep it around. I know they usually don’t purge cancelled accounts and their characters because there is always a chance that a former subscriber will come back when a new expansion rolls out. But again, I can’t really bank on that.

Don’t get me wrong - I think that WoW is probably still the best MMO on the market right now. It is definitely the best one that I played. I tried Guild Wars, Eve Online, and Anarchy Online and WoW is the only one that actually made me fork over the money for the monthly fee. The game is immense, it runs great on my crappy old computer, and the art direction gives it a unique look and feel that sets it apart from everything else out there. The world is immense and the level of detail put into the design of each location is breathtaking. If you never played an MMO and you want to check one out, WoW is the way to go. That said, I’m bored with it. Here is my post mortem report on what probably killed the fun for me in the end. I will make it a point to log into the game few more times before I hit that cancel button and see if I can locate the fun again but I’m not very optimistic.

Repetitive Game Play

I have said it before, but I’ll repeat it here once again. 99% of WoW missions are a variation of the classic RPG staple known as “kill 10 rats”. They mix it up a bit of course. It’s not always rats. In fact, when I say rats, I really mean a generic monster or humanoid mob that spawns in an area. But it’s all the same - your task is always to exterminate them. Like rats. It’s not always killing exactly 10 rats either. Sometimes you have to kill 15, 20 or just 5 of them. But every mission involves you going somewhere and killing things. Even when the quest doesn’t mention killing of any rats, you can safely assume that it will end up being an implicit requirement. For example, if a quest require you to to find 15 shiny doodads you can bet your sweet ass that these doodads will be either dropped by some sort of rats (or other creatures) at a very low rate, or will be located in an area that spawns new rat mobs every few minutes.

No matter what you do and where you go, you will eventually end up killing rats (or some other sort of local vermin). You are a hunter? Great, go hunt some rats! You are a rogue? Go assassinate me some rats. You’re a spell casting class? Go exterminate some rats with magic! There is very little variation. Once in a blue moon you will stumble upon a currier mission which requires you to take an item to a distant point on the map but those are rare, and far between. Invariably each of these currier runs starts a chain of missions which sooner or later culminate in killing some rats.

There are different modes of game play of course. For example there are instances, where you team up with a group of people and enter specific enclosed area to kill things. The area is instanced, which means that each group of players that enters it gets their own unique copy all for themselves. The enemies are harder and, and the loot is better. They can be an interesting experience if you can find a good group of people to play with. Unfortunately it is not that easy. See my next point about the social aspect of the game. I had one awesome Scarlett Monastery run in which we were all lv. 30-40 and had to work together not to wipe. People had their assigned responsibilities, the leader marked the targets for aggro, and for crowd control and we were hacking away like a well oiled machine. It was great experience, and one that I was never able to replicate again in any of the medium level instances with a rag-tag groups of random players.

Typical approach to running instances such as Scarlett Monastery is to bring a lv 70 alt with you who will plow through the enemies while the rest of the group runs up as swipes the loot from the fallen bodies (always voting need for everything of course). This is not much fun, since all you do is to follow the high level character and bicker over the drops with other players. Supposedly this issue goes away in the end game (since by that time everyone is level 70 and you just have to work together to survive), but I’m nowhere even near that point yet and I’m already sick of these type of instance runs.

There is always PVP but it doesn’t really do anything for me. I guess I’m just not that interested in pwning other players or anything even remotely related to that. Every duel, and PVP brawl I have fought ended with me being raped by a higher level close combat oriented player who could avoid my ice trap ignore the concussion shot, close in, and then end me with less than 4 close combat attacks. I do understand that people love this aspect of the game, but I never really was big into PvP in MMO setting. I can’t imagine playing on a PvP server where ganking n00bs is just a part of the experience.

Social Aspect of WoW

I know that many people play this game because all their IRL friends do, and they get to hang out and do things together in a virtual world. My WoW experience was a lonely one. I basically only know the following 5 kinds of people:

1. People who don’t play MMO’s and/or video games in general
2. People who don’t play WoW (at all/anymore)
3. People who do play WoW but on a different server (usually a PVP one)
4. People who do play WoW but are hard core alliance players and don’t want to create Horde character
5. People who do Play WoW but are never online when I am

The fact that the WoW world is so fractured into servers, and that you actually have to pay for server transfer does not really help. It means that if you pick the wrong server you either have to pay, or start a new character if you want to join up with a friend who is on another one. Mostly though it is scheduling - I play at odd irregular hours and my style is very much touch and go. I pop in for an hour, do few quests and sign off. I usually have clear objectives in my mind when I log in (finish quests A and B, go to a town, unload, visit trainer, see if I can level, etc..) and I rarely actually have time to “hang out” and chat.

So without close friends to hang out with in the game world, and no work/school/online buddies with similar schedules or preferences I was left to play with complete strangers. This is not the end of the world, but it is sometimes hard to find decent people in this game. And by that I mean people who do not fall into one of the two extremes: immature wow-tards, and hardcre wow-tards. The line between the two is fuzzy but it usually boils down to this: and immature wow-tard will call you a “fag” for tanking without a shield. A hard-core wow-tard will kick you out of the guild for it.

That is not to say there are no nice people in the game. There are, but they come and go and I’m not the most social person when I’m playing. As I said, I’m on a schedule and I want to accomplish certain things before I sign off. So while I may meet some kind and helpful stranger every once in a I usually don’t hang around long enough to “get to know them”. Sometimes you luck out and you hook up with a really great group of people. Most of the time you run around with bunch of idiots or assholes trying to convince you that they totally “need” every single item drop.

Running solo missions gets boring after a while for the reasons I stated above. Grouping up with complete strangers can get annoying unless you luck out and find some decent folks. Obvious answer to this problem is to join a guild but once again, not all guilds are created equal. I need a slacker guild which consists of people like me - casual players who are just looking for non-idiots to play with at weird hours. I really don’t want to have a schedule, I do not want responsibilities and another job. I don’t want a hard core riding guild!

At some point I actually did join a loosely organized guild like that but it did not deliver what I hoped for - a sense of community. Out of 60+ members I never see more than 4-5 online at the same time. The guild message board is a ghost town, and the guild chat is silent 80% of the time. This seems to be a common problem for small, non-riding guilds. Folks like me join up hoping to meet new people and form alliances but without responsibilities, common goals, perks, strong leadership and organization everyone just drifts apart and keeps doing whatever they were doing before. I don’t really know anyone from my guild. A lv 70 guild mate once ran me through the Scarlett Monastery and sent me some low level loot that was sitting in their bank for months which was nice. We never really met in-game after that.

Here is a request - if you are a regular/casual reader, you play Horde on Kirin Tor and you are happy with your guild let me know! I want in!

Anyway, let me know what draws you in? What makes you keep playing this game? At this point I’m a bit bored. I’m not sure if I’ll ever reach lv. 60. I will probably never get to 70 and venture into Outland because why should I invest in a game that already bores me. Is there a lot of interesting stuff to look forward to in the expansion and the endgame? Did I reach some sort of boring plateau that happens between levels 40 and 60? Let me know if I will miss out of some great fun if I cancel right now, but keep in mind the comments above.

In the meantime I think I might take a break and fire up Morrowind once again.

New game in the spirit of Name That Movie or TV Show cycle I’ve been doing here. This one is a bit different and possibly more difficult. Or it could be easier. I don’t know.

This version of the game may appeal to slightly different crowd. Instead of identifying movies, I’m asking you to identify video games in the picture below. And instead of random screenshots, I’m actually using the box covers. Naturally since each video game box has the name of the game printed on it, and usually a signature, distinct art I’m adding some Gaussian blur to each of them. I tried to make them fuzzy enough to conceal telltale details (and the title of course) but clear enough to allow you to recognize the box by shape, color and composition.

I tested it on my brother and he immediately identified 5 boxes correctly, 2 incorrectly and had no clue as to the rest. So hopefully this won’t be solved by the first commenter.

Something tells me I’m making it to easy, but we’ll see. Let me know whether you like this new variation on the game. I will probably continue making “Name that Movie” panels in the future, but this could be another fun distraction.