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Much ado about not a damn thing

So, as you might have heard, the almighty Blizz is selling cosmetic, non-combat, just fluff pets via their game store. Wow.com has the lowdown. I’m reading people up in arms about this already. I don’t see the problem. I actually think it’s a pretty good move. We talked about this a while back.

As usual, I wanna learn, so if you don’t support this move, I’m all ears. Tell me why. Just to provide some framework, here’s how I see it: I don’t care how much money Blizzard has, they’re still well within their rights to want more of it. There’s little debate there in my book. If they had put these stupid pets as .001% drop rate loot from $NASTYBOSS at the end of $LONGASSINSTANCE, people would have complained. If they had put it as acquirable rewards from a $KILOMETRICREPGRIND, people would’ve complained. It’s cosmetic. It doesn’t affect gameplay. It’s just a bunch of pixels next to the other bunch of pixels you call your avatar. Can’t offer it for free. Work must be compensated, so there you go.

Not even the fact that half of the proceeds from each sale of that despicable pandaren goes to a charity seems to quell the sentiment. Too expensive? Don’t buy it. Don’t like it? Don’t buy it. You think the pets are silly (I do)? Don’t buy them. Simple as that, folks.

There’s a ton of things to grill Blizzard for. This ain’t one of them. I applaud their move let the masses eat cake fluff.

Vendors

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

Veteran of the Wrathgate

One of the novellas in Dragonblight is 95% great. There is even an achievement, so the game is pushing you towards quality content (as opposed to the achievement requiring The Green Hills of Stranglethorn). This is the 20-mission chain ending in The Battle For The Undercity from the eastern Alliance Keep. It is one of the central storyline quests for the expansion, and its backbone provides strength and structure.

This is exactly what you should have expected coming into the expansion pack: war with the Lich King. Entering Northrend through the Borean Tundra, this is what I saw coming, with Nerubians attacking right at the beach. The Tundra turned out to be a long digression, but the main thread picks up. You have a castle on the edge of doom, you have slavering undead hordes. Clear the crypt! Blast the mines! Save the citizens! There are a few misses along the way, but it features great heroics, you fight the undead just like you signed up for, and the NPCs praise you at every step for being the epic hero who is making a difference. You can pretend that it matters, and phasing tech helps the illusion.

It leads to the excellent cinematic that Blizzard used to promote the expansion. It really is a great video. We played it several times at the LAN party just after it was released, and we wondered when Blizzard was going into film-making. They really do make great trailers, and having played through the zone, it makes sense why dragons appear and burn everything at the end (a bit of a WTF moment in the original release). Phasing even brings the effects in-game.

The very end of the arc is horrible, absolutely terrible, just like the end of the Death Knight intro. It is a deconstruction of god mode, showing you that the game can become even more pointless if you crank all the dials to 11 and have immortal characters. Get healed for 10,000hp per second with similar DPS! Accompany your 12+ million hit points worth of allies into battle! You can join in the fight, pretending that your tiny contribution matters and that the outcome is not pre-determined, or you can go AFK and let the NPCs play with each other in a long, repetitive fight. Watch your raid boss allies fight the raid boss enemy for several minutes of pointless animations! Rather than sit through fifteen minutes with no gameplay value, I recommend reading the text on the wiki and alt-tabbing. The voice acting is the only value added by having it in-game, and that could have been done with a much shorter cut scene. Even the animation is shoddy, because Varian Wrynn resets to his default stance for a moment between each talking emote, making his swords flicker in and out of existence as he talks. It fares poorly coming directly after some of the best quests and visuals in the game.

I fear for the future of the industry when some players consider this last quest one of the “most epic.” No, the numbers and gameplay are meaningless, and the storyline advances only by wiping out the storyline advancement that happened in the previous cut scene. Hey, let’s have several speeches about how the Alliance and Horde must unify against a greater foe, show them doing so, finally cash out the implications of the Forsaken, and then hit the reset button immediately? And do the players who have not done the Frozen Throne bonus campaign have any idea what Jaina is about?

: Zubon

MMO Restaurants

I see this, and I cannot help but think of Anthony Bourdain’s view on restaurant changes.

By now, unsurprisingly, our restaurant was rapidly failing.  I began to see for the first time, what I would later recognize as Failing Restaurant Syndrome, an affliction that causes owners to flail about looking for a quick fix, a fast masterstroke that will “turn things around,” cure all their ills, reverse the already irreversible trend toward insolvency.  We tried New Orleans Brunch – complete with Dixiland band.  We tried a prix fixe menu, a Sunday night buffet; we advertised, we hired a publicist.  Each successive brainstorm was more counterproductive than the one before.  All of this floundering about and concept-tinkering only further demoralized an already demoralized staff.

I sincerely hope free-to-play Tier 1 in Warhammer Online brings an influx of new blood and success to Mythic.  My gut reaction, though, was not hopeful.

–Ravious
let’s call him Bigfoot

Re-trying Champions

Champions Online is letting everyone play for free right now, so I thought I would give it another shot. Patch installation only crashed once. I found the character creator improved in little ways that help, and getting from start to a finished character felt more intuitive, although some of that might have been having seen it before. Everything was much improved by adjusting a few settings, especially eliminating those character outlines I hate so much (tolerable in Borderlands). The power-up auto-attack is a great tool for getting that feel of constant rock-em-sock-em action, with big booms off the charged-up power. I already knew where most things were from beta, so I was off at a run. I found that I wanted to like Champions.

Then servers crashed about half-way through the tutorial. Checking a few hours later, they were up, and there was a complete roll-back. I logged in my born again virgin character to see him at the starting point. The tutorial is not so good that I want to run it multiple times per day to get through it once. Maybe next free weekend, Cryptic.

: Zubon

The ArenaNet Genies

A feel good moment. I am always blown away by MMO fans. They are truly some top notch people, and their creativity is apparent in things like Halloween art contests.  It’s tough competition for developers to actually compete with the masters of their games, but they can and do.  ArenaNet worked with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to give one of their fans, Emily, a tour of the offices and a chance to play Guild Wars 2.  Things like this make me all fuzzy on an overcast rainy day.

–Ravious
the candy man can

Bad Design or Buggy Implementation?

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

Borderlands – The Almost MMO

Welcome to another exercise in the futility of defining an MMO.  It’s one thing in the MMO ‘sphere that we just cannot seem to stop doing.  My whole job is based on the power of words (the difference between “a” and “the” can destroy companies), and that just makes this whole conundrum worse.  Anyway, forewarned and caveated ye’ be.

Borderlands could be an MMO.  I am sure Gearbox is cringing right now, but the game came so close.  Borderlands came to the MMO meeting.  Sat down, drank coffee.  Listened to Habbo Hotel cry.  Ignored World of Warcraft.  Laughed at Darkfall’s jokes, and generally had a good time.  But, when it came for Borderlands to step up to the microphone and say “My name is Borderlands, and I am an MMO.”  It ran out of the conference room instead leaving all its good notes on MMOs and many on RPGs behind.

Gearbox Software make FPS games.  They make good and great FPS games.  I’ve been a fan of theirs ever since Half Life: Opposing Force.  Yet, there is no excuse for this.  They chose to dabble in the dark arts of RPGs and will be held accountable.  My bottom line in case you tl;dr redline on me is that Gearbox tried to create their FPS-RPG-[MMO] mashup like an American baseball fan trying to recreate cricket from watching just a few bowls.  (I’ve tried to understand cricket; I’ve tried so hard.) Continue reading Borderlands – The Almost MMO