I like The Onion, but I rarely find myself reading much of it because the full text rarely improves on the headlines. You might need to read the first paragraph to see where they are taking the joke, but stringing it out for 1000 words does not add much to the first 5 seconds. (I might take this as an object lesson, but look at me go, still typing.)
Syp finds the same problem with Star Trek Online, I said the same thing about LotRO skirmishes, and many of us have said the same about Borderlands and Torchlight: it is great at first, but there is not all that much improvement or variation over time. (I do credit the two single-player games for having interesting boss fights mixed into the repetition, where MMOs tend to rely on even more repetition, even in tank-and-spank bosses.) I appreciate being able to get 95% of the benefit in 5% of the time. Portal did that brilliantly and then ended.
: Zubon
Non-MMO inspiration banished to the first comment.
Borderlands has two speeds of play, much like its ancestor Diablo II: paced and rushed. When I play alone, I am going at my own speed. It might be a slow safe sniper battle or a quick chest run in one of the Havens, but if a pseudo-scientist looked at some waves or something, I feel that there would be an alignment. A pacing tempo, if you will. When I play with others, even close friends, not only does the tempo markedly increase but the speed of play is not always in alignment with the me. Frenetic is a good word for this in its most emotional definition.
I don’t like that feeling. I love playing with other people online, but I don’t feel at one with my gaming experience when that feeling happens. Continue reading ‘Breaking From the Collective Tempo’
I increasingly view my Achiever tendencies as a mental disease, a bit of neurological programming from our ancestral environment being over-stimulated by modern tools that provide all the signals without the underlying substance. Parts of our brains react to the bigger numbers and flashing lights in our Skinner boxes, but running on digital treadmills will not get us anywhere.
Today, I encourage you to separate the reward from the activity, the pellet from the lever. If it really is the journey rather than the destination, you should still want to go on the journey without a prize at the end. Would you keep re-running that dungeon if there was no more loot to gain? Would you farm if you had unlimited gold? For some things, you would. Good. Do those, freed of any worries about winning a roll on a 2% drop.
There is an easy way to test this: cheat. Grant yourself the reward at the end. This will not work in an MMO, but if the game saves to your hard drive, you can edit the save file. Are you really farming for experience or gold in some flash game? Are you running Diablo II or Borderlands bosses to try for better equipment? Backup your game, download a save game editor, and just give yourself the gun you want. There, now that you are no longer pulling the arm on a virtual slot machine, do you actually want to fight that boss multiple times per night?
Because let me tell you, we may call them Achievements, but they just measure time spent, and if you do not enjoy what you are doing along the way, you could be spending your time elsewhere. If your game gates the fun content behind that kind of repetition, throw the game away and find something that will not make you crawl through barbed wire. If you find that it is the getting rather than the having, I hate to tell you this, but desire is the root of all suffering. There will always be more useless crap to want, and apparently it is useless crap to you if you no longer want it once you have it. If you are really willing to work long hours for a digital gold star, I need some wallpaper replaced in the guest room. I’ll e-mail you the imaginary star, gold piece, or sniper rifle.
: Zubon
Previously: Ravious’s comments
An FPS with Diablo-style quests and loot set in the weird west. You go to the planet Pandora in search of the mythical Vault. You spend most of your time gunning down bandits. Everything has a bit of attitude.
A playthrough is on the order of 20 hours. You can shave off some time by skipping side quests and being less cautious than I was, but there are limits. First, if your recklessness gets you killed, you lose time. Second, there are levels, and skill will only get you so far if half the map can one-shot you. If you want to keep playing that character after opening the Vault, you can start more playthroughs, starting over with higher level enemies.
I am not a great connoisseur of FPSes, but it gives you fun ways to shoot things. It is neither realistic nor cartoonish, just a bit wacky. You can play 4-player coop, but there is no shooting at your friends beyond dueling. It is fun, although I do not know how lasting the fun will be after you have shot 100 of everything.
Continue reading ‘Borderlands Review’
Game review tomorrow, but today let’s answer the burning question: what is the song in the gameplay trailer and the final credits? That is No Heaven from DJ Champion. The MP3 is for sale at the usual places, which is probably the way to go as Amazon lists the full CD as a relatively expensive import.
: Zubon
This week has been really “blah” all around. There have been some exciting things. Like a possible new boss battle in Guild Wars. The Volume 1, epic quests becoming soloable in Lord of the Rings Online. And of course, the Evil Empire’s RMT sale of drunk panda pets. It’s all great, I guess. I would probably care more if it had not rained the past two weekends.
Mostly I have been plugging away at Borderlands. I gave up on multiplayer. Yes, I have tried every suggestion (GameRanger, Hamachi, port opening, etc.), and 90% of the time the system refuses. What drives me absolutely batty is that 10% of the time it lets me co-op and nothing has changed! Until I see a fix from Gearbox, I am just going to assume I bought and am playing a singleplayer FPS. And, quite a good one at that.
Last night I decided to head off to bed after turning in a quest, and along the way I got a purple-named revolver that shoots AoE electrical bursts. I stayed up for another half an hour just roaming around the main zone looking for bandits to electrocute with magnum bullets.
–Ravious
she sure got the boogie
My buddy invites me to his Ventrilo server, so we can chat while we are in our respective games. He is running his five-man dailies in WoW, I am starting a second playthrough in Borderlands.
“So, what’s this ‘playthrough’ BS? Does anything change, or do you just do the same boring-ass quests over again? Who wants to do that?”
“Aren’t you playing WoW right now?”
: Zubon
You may have expressed your sympathies for the NPCs in your favorite MMO. They never get to leave their shops, and their families miss them. Perhaps they do not even have shops, eternally standing in the sun and the rain in the hopes that someone will come by with frayed rat tails to sell. The lucky ones get to wander along a track, but most of them might as well be vending machines.
Borderlands takes that step. Shopkeepers? You can meet both of them, but mostly you deal with the vending machines they set up around the world. Drop your money in and grenades come out. Drop your sniper rifle in and money comes out.
How does that work? In a sci fi setting, you can have good computers in a box that huge. How do they empty/restock them, how did they get them in these forsaken corners of the world, and why don’t they get robbed? Look, this is a game where shotguns can fire electric rockets and pistols can generate their own ammunition. Being nitpicky about vending machines will not help you when you want to set fire to the acid-spitting dog-thing.
: Zubon
Continuing Borderlands/Torchlight week, there is an oddity with the scavenger quests (and possibly others), and it does not seem to affect everyone, which implies “bug” to me. It seems that, if you pick up quest objectives in an order other than the one in which the quest guide points you to them, the quest guide breaks. The little diamond on your map points to nothing in particular or perhaps one you already picked up. Luckily, the item(s) will still be in that general area, so you can just look around for a while; it helps to do this at night, when the green lights stand out.
Checking if I was the only one with this problem, I found many defenders of the current implementation. Their theory is that this is intentional behavior, that the quest guide is only supposed to point you in the general area. Some lean heavily on “scavenger hunt,” which is arguable even though scavenging has a meaning prior to (and hence yielding) scavenger hunt. They must believe that the first few quest points are exactly on the right spot as a way to ease you into it, at which point the real difficulty kicks in with no notice.
The sad thing is, I cannot say with surety that they are wrong. (Some of course claim surety that they are right. Dev comment, anyone? [Update: Scott provides, yes, a developer "known bug" quote.]) I have seen far worse “working as intended” statements. Anyone have the classic CSR response quote on the Everquest raid boss that spawned below the world, something like, “This is a challenge!”
: Zubon
