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Aperture Science

As in many digital places, in Paragon City, you click on doors to go through them. City of Heroes has an unusual mechanic in that it is [click to open the door and walk through it] rather than [click to open the door] and [walk through the open door]. Okay, quarter-second saved per door by combining the two, yay? Well, no: you cannot do just the second half, so if the door is open, you usually must wait for it to close so you can [click to open the door and walk through it] rather than just [walk through the open door].

This becomes notable in task forces and other full-team affairs when everyone needs to go through the same door, particularly if the door open/close animation is long. With the addition of the Weekly Strike Target, this compounds as multiple groups might be using that door. The Statesman Task Force has three missions using the same submarine door. There is a constant traffic jam around that little circle.

: Zubon

[GW2] To Err Is…

It’s human week for Guild Wars 2! KillTenRats was able to sneak in this tasty morsel last week, but now it’s officially begun with a week-long menu for the Tyrian race. Humans in the Guild Wars 2 world have an interesting story. They were the strongest race in the world, but their light was quickly fading by the time of Guild Wars. In Guild Wars 2, they have been pushed back to a single nation on the continent of Tyria. As Jeff Grubb often says, “they’ve been knocked back but not knocked out.”

Their history is rich, and unlike the other 4 playable races, humans might be the only race not native to the world. Yet, the gods that may have brought them to Tyria, have taken the training wheels off and simply walked away. Well they aren’t doing that well now that the half-dozen divine training wheels are off. I am looking forward to this kind of treatment for all the races in Guild Wars 2, especially in a week-long blitz!

–Ravious
to arr is pirate

Rift: MMO’s Greatest Hits Album

I participated in Rift’s 6th beta event over the past few days and had a generally good time. Now that I know the rift mechanic, it’s not new and shiny but it is still entertaining. I wonder what the rewards will be for the zone-wide invasions that happen every 2 hours or so (turned off right now) and how those will scale, but otherwise Rift is your standard MMORPG. A LoTRO guildmate asked last week for a reason to play it over LoTRO, and I was honestly at a loss besides “it’s new, and the rifts are fun”. The best way to quickly summarize Rift is as it’s kind of an MMORPG Greatest Hits Album, like the ones that collect the good songs of the year or decade. That may come off as overly negative, but I don’t intent it that way – it pulls off the collection of what works in other games in a cohesive, fun, total, and then adds the rift element on top. Giving a new bit of flavor to something that’s well-known and comfortable might be just the thing to snag in those players who are simply feeling their game has gone stale.

Anyway, in addition to these Deep Thoughts, I also played the Defiant side this time, and played a Mage and Rogue. I also played with two other tradeskills, the PvP zone Black Garden, and, thanks to my gaming family, got to see the guild functions a bit. Breaking that down after the cut.
Continue reading Rift: MMO’s Greatest Hits Album

Horde For Life

Considering caring about yesterday’s football game, Ilya Somin compares it to caring about fictional characters in books or films:

…vicarious identification with fictional characters is fun. Occasionally, it even has some educational value. The same, of course, goes for vicarious identification with sports teams. It’s fun to root for your team and hate its rivals, even if your initial reasons for identifying with Team A rather than Team B are essentially arbitrary (usually that you grew up in City A rather than City B).
…
Not everyone enjoys vicarious identification, of course. And among those who do, some prefer to satisfy their craving by means other than rooting for sports teams. But vicarious identification is a common and deeply rooted emotion — one that probably has biological roots. And it’s not really that surprising that it leads some people to root for sports teams in much the same way as it leads others to identify with fictional characters.

It is not a terribly long post, if you want to see how your views of Thrall and Elizabeth Bennet are essentially comparable — and if you write WoW/Pride and Prejudice crossover fan fiction, bonus! It links to preceding posts of the “who cares which team wins?” sort. I grew up in metro Detroit, so while my Facebook feed had some few comments on the game itself, it really lit up when the Chrysler/Eminem commercial came on. Hometown pride is much the same thing.

: Zubon

The Uncanny Valley of Genre Games

I tried Rift again yesterday. I still find myself unable to get very far out of a sense of “different enough to feel uncomfortable, similar enough to feel like I have already seen it all.” (Gameplay wise, not whatever the world might be.) The discomfort might not be there if I was a player of WoW rather than the similar games with slightly different controls; I am not sure if that would be good or just leave “same.”

I presume that goes away as you get into the Rift-unique stuff that lies beyond the introduction. That is a big problem. The tutorial zone is horrible in the sense that it shows off every way that Rift is like its competition while highlighting none of the ways it is unique beyond a small taste of the soul system. If you are making things familiar to target the audience that already plays this genre, you also need to make things different enough to give a reason to switch games (with all the related inertia. Not that “former WoW players” is not a huge market, but expect Blizzard to put in something special to convert them (at least temporarily) to “current WoW players” just before you launch, just to make it that much harder for you to get entire guilds to switch.

: Zubon

Hidden Looting

If you do not play City of Heroes, you may have found Wednesday‘s note odd: “you do not even need to tell your teammates when you [loot] one.” Why would you need to tell them? We are all familiar with loot spam in the chat window: you get a message for every piece of vendor loot and every roll from everyone in the raid on every item. Well, no, City of Heroes does not have that at all. No rolls, and you see only your own loot.

This was a conscious decision, a result of the test server. When meaningful loot was added, so were drop messages for your whole group. This would facilitate trading because you could see what others in your group are getting. This was also, by consensus, really annoying in a game with 8-character teams and enemies falling by the dozen. Other games’ implementations would let you click bodies to have all the loot spam happen at the end of combat, but City of Heroes gives you your drops instantly, no clicking, so everyone becomes that guy who is looting while you do not want pop-ups in your fight. Annoying, nigh-impossible to read/keep up with, and there might have been a faction arguing about social pressure to trade desirable drops.

You must work for drama when the game hides that kind of thing.

Personally, I rarely pay attention to even my own drops. Unless I am almost full, it does not matter until the end of the task force, when I would have time to shop, sell, craft, etc. The only drops you would want to slot immediately come at the end anyway. If I notice a good recipe set as it drops, great, but I forgot most of the names. I cheer at the pop-ups for Vanguard merits and “Incarnate Shard Bonded.” Ignorance makes downtime between events potentially exciting; I logged on for my third day back to find a purple recipe I had not noticed the night before. 60 seconds in, and it is already a great night!

: Zubon

That night went on to feature a frightfully poor PUG task force, so perhaps the purple recipe was cursed.

Scheduling Conflict

I realize not everyone watches the Superbowl, but seems like an unnatural amount of online games also have something going on this weekend. That I know about from the emails I’ve gotten in the last 24 hours:

Rift Beta
Rift’s load testing event
LoTRO’s Anniversary coins dropping
STO’s Anniversary event
CoX’s Issue 19 + 7th Anniversary event
DDO’s Event Preview
Plus a few beta events for a few MMORPGs still under NDAs.

I miss any? Pass the chips.

Wrong Context

All yesterday, I kept seeing headlines about like “Blizzard Cancels Hundreds of Flights Across the Midwest” and how many people Blizzard was forcing to stay at home. WoW has really gone mainstream. Was there a patch or something? I also heard about crashes and such, so maybe it did not go well.

: Zubon