The Iron Dagger

Lost trails of LoTRO: Vol VIII

Posted in Roleplay, Virtual Tourism on August 24, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

The lonely ride of Redwine Eardwrecca, exiled Rider of Rohan, continues. Retrace his hoofbeats from Vol I through II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII!

After going as far as the banks of the Anduin the last round, I couldn’t stop thinking of the last time I had played for real, there in the Great River, and all the things that had contributed to my retirement from LoTRO: absent friends, game burnout, the telltale signs that Turbine wasn’t so ‘into it’ anymore. I remembered the sinking feeling, and the feeling of liberation as well.

For a moment, I felt more like Redwine than I ever have. The exile long abroad where the stars are strange, knowing he can never go home again.

Then I did something I thought I would never do. I stepped back into the role of the active LoTRO player, and pushed on to a place nearly three years old but which I had never seen – the Argonath. The content border between those who bought Riders of Rohan and those who didn’t.

I sat on the bank for a little while, admiring the silent wardens of a long-vanished kingdom. And then chuckled to myself and rode on back.

From that ride came more shots harking back to my last active weeks in LoTRO: shots of Dunland and the Great River, back when the high-levels partied in those places.

Water under the bridge.

Desolation of the Gardens

Great River (48.0W, 32.7S)

I wish there was another, mob-free instance of this place to RP in, but too bad – the only way you’re getting in here is through a group of Signature-difficulty trolls.

Hands down, the Desolation gets my vote for Most Fairy-Tale-ish Place in Turbine’s Middle-earth. Look at that – way out in the Brown Lands, tucked away on the very edge of the map, it looks like something out of a Tim Burton production.

Turbine lore says this used to be a garden of the Entwives until it was ruined by Sauron during the War of the Last Alliance. Well, the last I heard of the Entwives was in the Old damned Forest, and this is a damned sight better-looking, so I’d say we need more of the Entwives in LoTRO.

Cliffs of eastern Pren Gwydh

Dunland (13.0W, 79.5S)

Dunland looks so much like Enedwaith, I feared I wouldn’t find anything worthy of inclusion in this series. The land proved me wrong. Not far from the uphill road to Tâl Methedras – itself a lovely little walk I almost snapped as well – the Dunlending cliffs offer sights to rival anything further north.

This spot, in particular, is a fine, flat slab of land where I can easily imagine Redwine pitching a tent and stoking a fire (if only such mechanics existed in LoTRO). Or perhaps keeping watch on that little cartrev down there…?

Weatherway

Bree-land (41.2W, 29.0S)

This lonely Arnorian bridge in the Weather Hills stands as one of the game’s finest examples of world & quest design. It sits in an area I’ve always thought to be one of LoTRO’s most neglected, just like Nen Harn up north. And it was that very remoteness that struck me.

What better place to take ownership of and enjoy a spot of secluded roleplay or screenshotting? Plus, being on the border between Bree-land and the Lone-lands, one can easily make a case for traveling in either direction.

I still wonder how many (or how few) have bothered to come out this far from Bree. Those who do will be rewarded with a small hub of repeatable quests, targeted at the Orc-infested ruins of Ost Alagos a short distance northeast. Skyrim much?

4 Comments »

My MMO regrets

Posted in Random Thoughts on August 21, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

Yeah, I’m lifting another topic from Blaugust without doing Blaugust. And I’m late to the party again. But what the heck.

I first read of this prompt on MMO Gypsy last week, and was tempted to hat-tip Syl in the title just for some déjà vu fun. That lovely snippet on ending their WoW career in Elwynn, “where it all began”, did it for me. I immediately began thinking back: did I ever have that sort of thought? Do I regret anything in an MMO?

Well, maybe not something quite so fierce, but it turns out I do…

1. Not keeping informed on the MMO scene much earlier

Failing to stay abreast of the latest news and developments means failing at a lot more in general, in many jobs. Gaming isn’t a job (though it certainly feels like one at times), but all the same, I wish I had mustered the interest to learn about RSS readers and top gaming sites and all that, back then.

I never was much for those things. In fact, to this day, I still limit my usage of them – and preachy lifehacker types who wave their mastery of said things like terrorists waving AKs still cheese me off. But to be practical, I acknowledge their utility. Perhaps, with them, I would not have missed out on so much.

One example should cut it here. The Lord of the Rings Online hit the scene in 2007. I only came aboard in 2011, some months after F2P hit. In fact, it took the wildfire that was the news of F2P to bring it to my attention – and even then, the alert came through a friend. Who didn’t even play MMOs.

I remember how amazed I was that a LoTR MMO existed, let alone thrived for four years. Whether or not I would have paid the sub (or a lifetime sub) at the time (I was still a hapless, and quite penniless, army conscript in 2007) is irrelevant. I missed the boat that became the ‘main’ of my MMO career. The glory days – when the LoTRO roleplay scene was young and its legends unborn, when the Rift of Nûrz Ghâshu might as well have been Mordor, and when Gondor was a distant dream amid wonder and hope.

2. Not taking any screenshots of my WoW RP

It may sound impossible to believe, but it’s true. What little roleplay I did find on Azeroth and Outland, I completely neglected to capture. I cannot explain why – I know only that the same malaise (I choose to call it that) would strike me again years later in Neverwinter. But at least I have chat logs from Faerûn.

From WoW, I have only memories, one in particular. It was still the Burning Crusade era, and a Hellfire Ramparts PUG threw my Human Warrior, who I was roleplaying as a Stormwind knight, together with this Human Paladin player who shared my love of Orcs & Humans throwbacks. We charged the Fel Orcs completely in-character, with my knight crying vengeance for the lives lost in the First War and his considerably more tempered paladin providing the voice of reason. And, naturally, the group leader threatening to kick us if we carried on this nonsense (he didn’t, though).

Any shots from that would have a place of honor on this blog (maybe as a case study of the persecution RPers face). But sadly, I have none at all.

3. Not doing my homework on LoTRO when I joined

Ah, LoTRO again. I did eventually sign up, like I said, but where to begin on the regrets? I’ll just bring one up – the first. A combination of impatience, over-zealousness, and blinkered romance leading to months of sunken time.

I knew from the start I wanted roleplay with my Middle-earth MMOing, but WoW didn’t teach me anything. What I should have done, right off the bat, was research the servers on offer to pinpoint the ones where the RP action was at. I didn’t. Overeager, my patience tested by the game’s long installation process, I dived into the server the launcher recommended. This was the only Middle-earth MMO on the market! Surely there’d be plenty of Tolkien geeks around who’d be up for the spontaneous, open-world roleplay I looked forward to.

Like I said, blinkered and romantic. Imladris turned out to be one of the smallest servers, filled only with typical MMO jock types either unwilling or unable to compete with the jock-ness on the big servers. Even after finding out, I actually made it as far as level cap (one or two quests away from finishing the Siege of Mirkwood Epic Quest) before deciding to pack up and leave. So I guess that counts as two regrets in one.

Heh, remembering all this certainly takes me back. We all have regrets, from what I’ve read on the blogosphere, but I suppose I’m fortunate that none of mine (at least, none of the three I’ve brought up) involve things beyond my control – like guild drama. Many say it’s easier to accept that. I prefer to own my regrets. They make better learning experiences then.

4 Comments »

On game difficulty and the concept of ‘challenge’

Posted in Opinions on August 18, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

I’ve wanted to write something on this for some time now, and reading MtBerry Yoshi’s post on the same was my push to do so. He talks about his own changing attitudes, over time, from challenging himself in a game’s higher difficulty settings to ezmoding through just for the story. I’ll bet it’s something a lot of us do.

Anyone who, like me, came from a gaming background where the only peers were stereotypical rabid competitive types should sympathize. Normal mode was these guys’ Easy. ‘Real men’ played Hard. Or Brutal. Or Legendary. Whatever.

Here’s the thing. Difficulty settings are handicaps – things only doled out when one contestant is superior to the other. In gaming, there’s scant argument on that superiority. We are capable of a spontaneity and cunning no computer can match, even when we’re playing by their rules.

By that token, cutting our AI adversaries some slack would be the sporting thing to do, and perhaps it is. But what slack is that? Easy mode means different things in different games.

Let’s take RTS games. Higher difficulties in many of those involve the AI incorporating advanced units, like a sparring partner taking the kid gloves off – which is sensible, since there’s nothing stopping us from doing that regardless of difficulty. But it doesn’t end there, does it? Any AI’s counter to our human intelligence and strategy would be a product of cranking up variables within its reach – basically, cheating.

Accelerated production cycles. Reduced unit costs. Waived penalties. An RPG or FPS equivalent would be AI enemies dealing more damage and suffering less – and, in the latter case, enjoying ridiculous accuracy. I like to quote the example of a test match I ran with a friend in Unreal Tournament years ago, against bots on the Godlike setting: it was (and I am keeping a very straight face here – this is not exaggeration) nothing but five minutes of getting headshotted across the map within a second of each respawn.

Call that a handicap, or anything you like, but none of this makes for a fulfilling experience, even in the pseudo-competitive context. It’s the gaming version of an employee tasked with clearing next month’s worth of work by the end of the day. There’s only so far such shenanigans can go without challenging the notion of challenge.

There are, of course, games that attempt to introduce different variations of the difficulty setting. MtBerry Yoshi mentioned The Last of Us, which I never played, but I did play Fallout: New Vegas, and its Hardcore Mode comes to mind. It was designed to encourage keener (or more risk-averse) play by adding elements of realism (hunger and thirst, ammo weight, greatly slowed healing, etc), which sounded cool, but personally, I found it more a mere inconvenience than anything. Abjuring VATS targeting and aiming with the then-newly introduced iron sights was more my idea of a challenge.

This is just my take, naturally. Everybody wants different things – different challenges, even – from games. But there it is. Challenge is not bringing a knife to a gunfight. If you want challenge, play against a human. Don’t measure your skill (or others’) as a gamer against arbitrary advantages imposed in lieu of an actual, meaningful honor system.

10 Comments »

The problem with inspecting other players in MMOs

Posted in Random Thoughts on August 15, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

One thing that strikes me about TESO is how there is no inspect function. Coming from LoTRO where you can see not only what someone else is wearing, but what they choose to show they’re wearing (why on Nirn doesn’t a TES MMO have a cosmetic system?), I found this most odd.

At first, I thought ill of it. Why would the devs hide something so fundamental from us? Then I read the Grumpy Elf’s experience with the ‘if you were better geared’ syndrome. Ho ho ho. I guess it’s not so fundamental after all, nor such a bad idea.

Thus far, my PUG experiences in TESO have been pretty amicable. No one ragequits, no one disses, and only once have I seen a leader give an underperformer the silent boot. (That counts as bad conduct in my book.) Even on my Dragonknight, where I’m supposed to tank, no one throws hissy fits when I don’t block enough or exhibit non-tanky behavior. I wonder – would I still have it this easy if there was an inspect function and the team saw my plain, crafted, unenchanted digs?

Back in LoTRO before I gave up on group content, it was practically the opposite. The millstone of optimization and by-the-book builds hung heavy around my neck even in landscape groups; one time when I took my Captain into a Dol Dinen run, the leader inspected me and promptly questioned why I had standards instead of heralds equipped. Recognizing the imperious tone even across the filter of an MMO chat window, I pulled out my bannerman with a shrug and marched on. It was a tiny thing. But it still sticks with me, even years later.

I’ve heard of other cases where folks are denied a spot on PUG raids because they’re not in all-teal gear, or have ‘the wrong stats’ on their Legendaries. LoTRO makes it simple to find out, since you can inspect a player from his or her name in the chat window. Remembering these, perhaps it’s a good thing TESO keeps how well- or poorly-geared a player is hidden. The last thing we need is more ammo for elitists to fire players from group content.

In my ideal MMO, there would be both an inspect function and a cosmetic system – and the former would apply only to the latter. True, that might get the gear hounds howling. Which is why I thought of an MMO I hardly think about anymore: DC Universe Online.

Perhaps DCUO is the one doing it right. There, they use Combat Rating, a derived statistic nobody seems to have figured out the workings of, which is calculated from gear. (I heard it may even take into account gear sitting in your inventory, which, if true, is pretty screwy.) CR serves as a gate for instances and raids, like LoTRO’s old Radiance system, but nobody can see your exact number. Group leaders can’t verify your CR when you put it forward while lobbying for a PUG spot. They can only inspect you – and then only if you’re close – and draw their own conclusions from your gear.

Aren’t some job applications that way? Yes, go ahead and confirm I do know everything I say I know on my CV. But whether or not I have enough of some arbitrary skill you say you need? Sorry, my word will have to be good enough for you…

7 Comments »

My MMO firsts (hat tip to Syp)

Posted in Random Thoughts on August 12, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

Yeah, I’m lifting a topic from Blaugust without actually doing Blaugust. I know. But given I’m currently between jobs with an unrelenting avalanche of work foisted on me, and I still treasure my gaming time, I figured I’ll just write when I can – about what I can. I’m no Seth Godin.

This one comes courtesy of Bio Break’s Syp. It’s always nice to take a look back and see where the milestones lie – and see if any have rotted away.

My first online gaming experience: Several

Yes, several. Because memory fails me whenever I try to recall which I got into first: forum RPGs or browser-based games. This was back in 2000/2001.

The former didn’t last that long. I used to call them ‘bulletin board RPGs’ until I learned about BBS doors, which sounds close enough to be confusing. I played only in small, niche, homebrew settings, which inevitably petered out after a month or two.

The latter lasted longer. Wonder who still remembers Swirve.com and their flagship title, Utopia? I was there for two ‘ages’ (Ages 9 and 10! Renaissance and Conflict! Good God, I still remember), which comes up to about six months or so, before reluctantly taking my leave due to it hurting my grades. The camaraderie and action I experienced in Utopia is truly a thing apart in my gaming career – something I may write about someday if more memories surface.

Other browser games I remember playing quite extensively are Terran Legacy, World at Ruins, and Grendel’s Cave. Amazingly, these are still around!

My first MMO: World of Warcraft

I still remember my very first taste of it: at a private LAN party, where my gaming buddy let me roll a toon on his account (I went with Human Rogue) for a 20-minute spin. That wasn’t very long after WoW first launched, I think – and after Burning Crusade hit the scene, I joined him.

Though I was never very hardcore, and largely missed out on WoW’s vaunted raiding scene, the game was my go-to for gaming fun for the next few years. Not until LoTRO went F2P did I discover a substitute anywhere in the same league.

My first guild: World of Warcraft

Granted, it was a small social guild made up of my buddy, some folks he knew, and some other folks from our region. But a guild is a guild, right?

I still miss the camaraderie we had at times, although I certainly don’t miss the guild’s insipid names. It went through several equally insipid incarnations, ranging from the ‘guild leader just gave up’ sort (Coffee & Tea) to the cringe-worthy ‘one-worders are cool’ sort (Destiny, Vigilance, Resurrection, et cetera ad nauseum)

My first MMO love: Lord of the Rings Online

WoW was great, but LoTRO was better. I remember pitching it to my friends as ‘WoW 2.0’, so impressed was I by how much it improved upon the WoW formula.

I ended up staying nearly two years there, from after Siege of Mirkwood to before Riders of Rohan, and spent much more on it than I ever did on WoW. To this day I refuse to uninstall LoTRO. I never know when I might be tempted to just log back in and attempt to relive a few old memories – and besides, I have no MMO better suited for landscape photography.

My first MMO blog: You’re looking at it

Technically, I had blogs before this one, and one was even about gaming as well. But for all practical purposes, The Iron Dagger is my first blog where I talk about MMOs. Not only about, though – don’t want to pigeonhole myself.

My first <insert industry publication here> assignment: None yet

I’ve only just started, haven’t I?

1 Comment »

Lost trails of LoTRO: Vol VII

Posted in Roleplay, Virtual Tourism on August 10, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

The lonely ride of Redwine Eardwrecca, exiled Rider of Rohan, continues. Retrace his hoofbeats from Vol I through II, III, IV, V, and VI!

So most of LoTRO’s servers are seeing the sunset, and I wasn’t surprised at all to learn that Imladris was among them. It was my first server, a small-town sort of server, and I remember folks saying proudly in world chat how they preferred these small communities to big-city ones like Elendilmir or Brandywine. But that also means they’re first in line to get the axe.

Imladris also happens to be the server Redwine dwells on – and the one all my friends who played LoTRO with me in the beginning have characters on. We have our own little kin, now full of mains and alts abandoned years ago by their owners – a graveyard on a dying world.

Redwine’s ride nears its end. Of course, I could just drop-kick his Rohirric ass onto another server, but it wouldn’t quite feel the same. With that, I think Vol X will be the last in this series. I’m going to enjoy myself in these last four entries. Onward!

Flowers of the Gloomglens

Enedwaith (21.5W, 64.6S)

Yeah, I know you can find these flowers all over Enedwaith. But you know what? There’s a difference between flowers on flat ground and flowers on slopes. There’s a visual romance to the latter I can’t deny.

Nowhere else in Enedwaith do I see this romance so prominent than the Gloomglens. Not far from Maur Tulhau, you’ll find this knobbly patch of land – a tad claustrophobic thanks to all the trees and elevations, and swarming with bugans, but a pretty place in a pretty land, nonetheless.

Munudh Dûv

Enedwaith (13.2W, 70.9S)

A short hop from Harndirion, this slice of paradise takes my cake for lakeside strolls. I’ve posted shots of lakes before, but this one blows them all out of their own water: I’ve never seen one so crystal-clear, and so picturesque, even in Evendim – the land of picturesque lakes.

And here, you get the added benefit of having no ruins, for once. Just mother nature. Some folks need to put together a kin and establish a frontier settlement here. Or, you know what, just designate this a AONB.

Now, if only someone would tell me what Munudh Dûv translates to. I thought it was Welsh, but Google Translate is coming up blank…

Ost Celebrant from the Wyrmdenn

Great River (54.7W, 28.3S)

This is really not a place to be doing any casual roleplay in. The Wyrmdenn, in case the name wasn’t clear, is a nest of bloody avancs. But I just came for the sights, and boy, was I not disappointed.

The Great River was where I stopped playing LoTRO, but I did remember the lovely fields of Parth Celebrant with all the striking purple flowers. (It’s heather, isn’t it?) It was great seeing them again, but since I’d already snapped the flowers of Enedwaith, I decided to head further east into the Rushgore. And there, coming across this lonely little boardwalk with the swans, I turned around and got my picture.

Gondorian architecture doesn’t look so nice from a distance; what is it with all the candle-holder style towers? Still, through the light fog, you get a sense of the grandeur that was.

3 Comments »

In unexpected appreciation of TESO’s Fighters Guild

Posted in Random Thoughts on August 7, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

It’s been a while since my return to Tamriel. Since then, my journey has been going more or less as I expected it would: my Pact Imperial Dragonknight marching on singing Whitesnake’s ‘Here I Go Again’, and my new Breton Nightblade slinking around in the wake of two* hotheaded Redguards – my gaming buddy.

* He was a Templar. Then he saw some awesomesauce build somewhere, and became a Nightblade too. I’ll never get how some folks can’t play an MMO without leaning on ‘proven’ builds – or repeating content they just slogged through just to test out said builds. But anyway…

As ever, despite the paucity of roleplay I’ve encountered on my travels – timezones again, no doubt – I try to stay in-character to some degree. This includes in-game choices. Hence, only my Dragonknight is a Fighters Guild member, and I have to say: their quest line is the one I’ve benefited from the most as a player (not a character) thus far.

I’m not used to quests in MMOs being not just level-gated but indeterminate as well, so having to wait for Meridia knows how long to continue a faction’s story felt both odd and refreshing. But that was fine. What really threw me was what when that continuation finally came knocking and I saw how far away I was being summoned.

I was like “lolwhut?”. Mournhold, for chrissakes – in the next zone, a zone I was utterly underleveled for. No way I was going there until I was ready. So I polished off whatever quests I had left in Stonefalls, and then… realized I still wasn’t ready. Okay, that’s it – to Oblivion with readiness. Let’s make like Odysseus and do things the hard way.

I saddled up and rode south into Deshaan, sticking to the roads, ignoring questgivers like an arrogant noble turning his nose up at panhandlers. It was then that something prompted me to stop over at the Brooding Elf Inn in the Quarantine Serk, where I witnessed my first instance of TESO RP.

I was surprised to see roleplay, even just a spot of tavern roleplay among two people, so far from the capital. Had I stumbled into the Pact’s real RP hub? No, the friendly Redguard lady I /whispered told me. The hubs are elsewhere. I should check out this or that site to see what guilds roleplay Pactside. Oh. Guild RP. Of course. This is still an MMO…

I plodded on, cleared the Guild quest in Mournhold, and waited for the next one to arrive. And laughed when it did. Stormhold. In Shadowfen – the next, overleveled zone again. Devs, I see what you’re doing.

I took my time. Headed over when I was ready. Got things done with the usual efficiency. And before long, along came ~~a spider~~ the next continuation, which is where I was inspired to write all this.

Fort Amol, in Eastmarch. Where the hell is East… oh. Oh. OH. Skyrim. I’m going back to Skyrim!

By the Eight, it’s a long way from the Black Marsh border. A lot further than I’ve traveled before. But hold on – I’ve already seen a slice of Skyrim. Bleakrock Isle. Surely I can wayshrine there, then hop off the southern coast and swim over. Looks like a short distance on the map.

The slaughterfish disagreed.

This is one screwed-up mechanic. Do you know what I did to those little bastards back in the day? Here, I can’t even fight back! And they can chomp me even when I’m jumping above the water’s surface! What was Tamriel’s fishermen dealing with in this era, some long-lost species of proto-piranhas with telekinetic jaws?

Anyway, with that second, biting reminder in a day that this isn’t Skyrim Online, I set out to do things the hard way again. And it was a ride to remember – even more memorable than the cross-country I ran with my gaming buddy from Daggerfall to Wayrest (we needed to bloody respec).

The feeling I got crossing the border into the Rift was quite something. I found myself releasing the shift key as I rode, clopping along slowly to admire the Nordic countryside – and chuckling at the frighteningly overleveled saber cats by the roadside. Why, the netches in Stonefalls and Deshaan never even came close to eliciting such delight!

And when I rode into Riften, and saw the familiar marketplace where Brynjolf had first had me prove my worth to the Thieves Guild of the Fourth Era, my chuckling only intensified. Good old Zenimax – keeping things more or less the same two ages prior. I actually found myself looking to one side and expecting to see Balimund the smith, whose forge I had so often requisitioned. Pity he wasn’t around performing his miracles with steel in this time; business is a lot better with a dozen Vestiges than with one miserly Dovahkiin.

This was odd. Sure, I enjoyed my time in TESV. (Even though I ranted about it.) But it was nowhere near the (gamer-) life-changing level of my TESIII odyssey.

It helps, of course, that TESO’s Skyrim resembles Skyrim’s Skyrim far more than TESO’s Morrowind resembles Morrowind’s Morrowind. But is that all? Graphics? What else is missing – gravelly Dunmer voices? Levitation? Mark and Recall?

I’ve long suspected that, as with many others like myself, my love for TESIII stems as much from the perceptions of youth as from the game’s own merits. Ironic how it’s taken an MMO activity, let alone one that many MMO players scorn as ‘tedious’ and ‘unnecessary’, to hammer that home.

Perhaps I don’t love Morrowind after all. Perhaps what I really love is my memories of it – memories from a game I was equally fond of. But at least, unlike many real-life instances, I simply have to reinstall that game to relive the memories, albeit in a somewhat diluted fashion. It’s not quite the same outside virtual worlds – as anyone who’s revisited their childhood haunts might know.

So thank you, TESO Fighters Guild, for sending me over the hills and far away. I’d have gone there sooner or later, of course, but your little quests made it sooner, and I’m grateful.

Game revivals, reboots, spiritual successors… oh my?

Posted in Random Thoughts on August 4, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

When I saw the news that Baldur’s Gate will be getting an expansion, I nodded like a Gandalf.

As a gamer who loves and supports old-school titles, I have no reason to not approve of it. It’s a logical next step after BG’s Enhanced Edition, and keeps that refresh from becoming just another prettification. It’s another lease of life for a towering RPG classic many modern gamers may shun solely on account of it having fewer pixels than Uncharted 4.

Now here comes a massive update for Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. In the same month. One can’t help thinking the age of classic revivals – or, more cynically, a rising tide of nostalgia plays by devs – is at hand.

As I acknowledged before, it works either way. I’m sure even folks who have a lot less time for gaming these days would appreciate what Beamdog and Aspyr are doing – it might even inspire some to squeeze a little nostalgia gaming time back into their timetables. Which may lead to more – revival begetting revival.

The devs’ real audience, though, ought to be the uninitiated. We’re talking a brand new market of gamers, weaned on mainstream MMOs and gorgeous single-player RPGs like the BioWare stuff. Capturing that huge share of the gamer market would be a coup.

With the blasts to the past rising like Bane’s ultimately hypothetical fire, I find myself distinguishing revivals, like Dragonspear and the KOTOR II patch, from spiritual successors like Pillars of Eternity, and reboots like the upcoming Doom.

Reboots, of course, have been the in-thing for quite a while. I’m glad to see that while Hollywood botches them all the time, game devs seem to have a better track record at getting it right – XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Shadowrun Returns, and God knows how many else, and now we have more reborn legends like Unreal Tournament and BattleTech to watch for. Which begs the question of why two creative camps, working on products so closely related, end up with results so dissimilar.

As for spiritual successors, there’s not much to say. They are, for all practical purposes, their own games. Yes, ‘spiritual successor’ is a powerful sell, at least for me. But I always, always remind myself to judge each one on its own merits. (The ‘how well it imitates the past’ part has its own section in my mental review form.) Something I have great difficulty doing for films, incidentally!

But what of revivals? What if this is the fate of the classics – to be resuscitated and remarketed to a new generation?

I don’t doubt there are those who disapprove of what amounts to game necromancy. Don’t tamper with the legacy of a great game. Let it rest in the mausoleum of memory, in the honored halls of history. Et cetera.

Well, I do not count myself among them. Old is gold. And any effort to share the glories of the past with today’s masses can only be lauded. Whether folks can endure the ‘horror of the pixels’ is another matter.

2 Comments »

Thoughts on an interview with two Japanese devs

Posted in Opinions on August 1, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

My gaming buddy, a Final Fantasy XIV player and fan, sent me this old interview of its redeemer, Yoshida Naoki, in which he and Futami Yosuke, a producer on the Sword Art Online games, discuss MMOs. The English translation is a good one, and makes the whole thing a pretty good read. Recommended.

As I read along, I found myself thinking up responses to some things both gentlemen said. This post is basically just a record of those. I seriously had no idea what to even title it.

“A game needs to be appealing even if communication is held to the bare minimum.”

Yoshida-san really slams it out of the park here, especially with the fishing analogy. People’s definitions of the ‘multiplayer’ in ‘MMO’ have changed. Once (if ever), it was about collaboration. Now it’s just about being alone in the crowd – being surrounded by active players to remind you that you’re not alone.

I’ve often said that the trick in MMO design is creating an environment that encourages players to stay. Here it is, and its efficacy is not an intrinsic thing, but the product of shifting attitudes. And we have one very successful dev encouraging others to cater to the soloists. Not right or wrong – just mere pragmatism.

Do I like it? Not really. Do I want it to change? I don’t know. Perhaps this deserves a post to itself. After all, I’m playing The Elder Scrolls Online now, and what better place to examine the ‘solo MMO’ dynamic?

“As time progresses, some NPCs in town will actually talk to you as you walk by. Those are the type of immersive features that I worked on with our development team.”

Futami-san was talking about Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment here, which is a game that simulates an MMO, so I can understand the definition of ‘immersion’ as ‘NPCs programmed to behave in a realistic manner’. But I don’t agree with it.

Because immersion is far more than that. It’s the sum of variables, key among which is the player’s own creative senses. To borrow the words of Storium founder Stephen Hood, “the computer is not able to respond to you. To the full breadth of human creative expression”. The best any game can do is to provide a richly detailed game world, and the tools for players to immerse themselves.

Immersion can only be forced so far through scripted actions. My own playthroughs of the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games hammered that home for me; once I knew what lay ahead, the third time was definitely not a charm.

“In Japan, players strongly adhere to the communities that they are a part of. Even if they aren’t a member of a particular community, they tend to strive to blend in with regards to the tone and atmosphere of the setting that they’re in. You could view it as being harmonious, but you could also view it as being passive as well. On the other hand, foreign gamers are much more likely to be highly individualistic. You gather a group of these unique individuals together to form a party and go on adventures. Instead of going with the flow, everybody seems to discuss their objectives and opinions more freely.”

Uhhh…

“Players from Japan tend to want the ability to create an original character. They want an avatar of themselves, so that they can go on adventures alongside Kirito. Foreign users are the opposite; they want to go on the adventures as Kirito.”

More generalization. Okay, I’ll bite. I’m going to reach out to my readers here, most of whom are non-Japanese. (Or so WordPress tells me.) Do you seriously fall in with this? Because I don’t.

In one of my first posts on this blog, I talked about the difference between ‘roleplaying’ and ‘playing a role’. A long time ago when I was less picky about such things, sure, I didn’t mind stepping into known characters’ skins. But the fun of that declined fast. Adventuring alongside those characters as an original protagonist may require a good bit of suspension of disbelief, since, once again, there’s no way the game can be scripted to accommodate you fully. But it’s the best we can get in this area, so why not?

“In the past, I’ve said something like：“If you use the Content Finder, you can just treat most of the people you’re matched up with as though they were NPCs.” (Laughter) That’s not meant to encourage players to act out and be jerks, but rather to reinforce the notion that it’s OK to just form a party with people whom you’ve just met and to go out and have fun.”

I’m not sure I see the joke. Many have remarked on how dungeon finders have killed what little of the social aspect remains in MMOs, and while I’ve said nothing on the subject, I’ve certainly experienced my fair share. Again, here we have a successful dev backing something disagreeable.

Forming a PUG and heading out to accomplish a goal is not quite the same as a random dungeon queue. Even the act of forming that PUG calls for the ‘bare minimum of communication’ – the willingness to deal with other players as human beings. (Benefit of the doubt here.) Dungeon finders take even that away.

So, no. It’s not exactly funny to encourage fast-food content consumption, and then encourage people to treat fellow players as NPCs just because. Let’s do better.

“We considered starting the game out with a very simple UI, and adding options and settings to increase the information load as you progressed through the game, but we decided against it. If a player were to progress through the game without realizing that such options existed, then they could end up being the same level as another player who’s had a far more enriched and in-depth experience.”

Why would that be an issue? Aren’t UIs, or HUDs, or whatever we choose to call them, merely a game’s way of filtering down to us the information it’s crunching behind the scenes? ‘Enriched’ and ‘in-depth’ are a bit subjective here.

I once read an excellent piece on the evolution of RPGs (for the life of me, can’t remember where or who wrote it) which talked about how, in the tabletop days, GMs used to roll dice behind screens to hide outcomes from players – and now that computers are doing all the dice-rolling, it’s strange that we have to see every little calculation and bit of output.

Contains Moderate Peril’s Roger Edwards had something to say on this a while ago. To quote him, “if you’re not using a specific element of the HUD, then remove it and that goes for skills as well.” Amen! Let us decide how we want to play: Call of Cthulhu-style or EVE-style. After all, we all have different thresholds for ‘information load’.

On getting powergamers into roleplaying

Posted in Opinions, Roleplay on July 29, 2015 by The Iron Dagger

I read this article at Roleplaying Tips with some degree of amusement. Dealing with powergamers has been, if not the bread and butter, then certainly the morning coffee of both my gaming and roleplaying careers – and it’s always good to see folks thinking of ways to get them involved in the finer things.

It’s a good piece, and one I wish I had read during my return to tabletop roleplay some years back. The all-munchkin group that spurred my prompt un-return could sure have used some of these tips. (My own pro tip: don’t use the WoW soundtrack for scene-setting. Makes folks start jibing about WoW, and before you know it, the thrill is gone.)

But as I read it, I found myself thinking of what would happen if I really did try to use them in a local context. I’m sure this applies elsewhere too, since powergamers are the same the world over.

The article’s thrust appears to be that GMs should “make character identity integral to the plot”, mandate in-character ‘sideline activities’, and dole out in-game bonuses to players who comply with both. Straightforward enough. It scratches the rewards itch that keeps powergamers going. But it’s also predicated on that very itch, which subverts the intention entirely.

Grind in MMOs is incentivized by nature because even with rewards, it’s a chore. Likewise, we shouldn’t expect powergamers who don’t RP to find RP any less of a chore with rewards.

More often than not, I think, they’d simply approach ‘character identity’ the same clinical, min-maxed way they approach their rollplaying. Encouraging them to put the story first calls for an approach that doesn’t penalize them materially, enabling them to pay more attention (and hopefully interest) to roleplay.

One example is collaborative writing game Storium. In Storium’s card-based system, narrators drive their plots by creating Challenges for players to spend characters’ Strength or Weakness cards on. For instance, a Challenge representing an armory guard might be addressed with a silver tongue or an intimidating personality (a Strength card), or with a naïve or chicken-hearted nature (a Weakness card).

The great thing is, whoever ‘completes’ a Challenge, akin to the ‘last hit’ mechanic in MOBAs, wins narrative control on how it turned out. So what’s to stop them from ponying up only Strength cards, and writing that they talked their way past the guard and made off with the armory’s best gear? This is one very simple case, but it makes my point. Whether the rest of the story would be better served by the party not being armed to the teeth was probably not a consideration when the powergamer made his move.

Fortunately, there is a counterweight: ‘weak’ outcomes are not synonymous with losing. An obstacle overcome with a ‘weak’ result is still overcome – just with interesting side effects. Perhaps the guard grew suspicious and attacked the party, wounding someone before he was taken down. Or he managed to escape and raise the alarm. Either way, the way into the armory is clear. This way, GMs can spice up encounters and plots without putting off munchkins.

If we’re looking for compliance alone, incentivizing works. But in the long term, it might take more than rewards for powergamers to prioritise the story over conventional gains. The GM’s own ability to make losing out, or undesirable outcomes, interesting is what counts.