One of my side comments in the discussion surrounding my last post alluded to me not playing SWTOR very much was because of the broken companion pathing whenever I play it. I've switched PCs, replaced CPUs and graphics cards (and manufacturers), and I even have the game installed on an NVMe SSD drive --a far cry from the slowpoke 5400 rpm mechanical drive it was once on-- but all to no avail.
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| My old Sith Inquisitor is still somewhere in Chapter 10 of the KotFE expansion. |
Here, I started at this entrance area in Nar Shadda, right after you disembark from your ship, and I ran toward the taxi. Literally all I did; no attacking, no shenanigans, no nothing:
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| Okay, so Senya is now just out of view... |
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| If you look closely at the map, you can see that she moved about half speed from the screenshot just above this one. |
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| And now, having arrived at the taxi, I can swing the camera around and watch her go "Oh shit! I'm coming!" |
Imagine if I were in a fight and she were dilly dallying around far behind me. In the original implementation of SWTOR, where some of the story fights were really hard (I'm looking at you, original difficulty of the final boss of the Jedi Consular story), I'd have been dead by the time my companion would have decided to show up. As it is, I haven't died due to these sort of problems, but I can only stand to have to play nursemaid to my companion for as long as it typically takes me to reach the end of Chapter One of the SWTOR Vanilla areas.
There's other changes over the years that irk me, such as replacing the original in game map with that map reminiscent of the map in TERA --and believe me, combat aside, you don't want your MMO to ever be thought of as similar to TERA*-- but that can be remediated by customization. But the companion issue? Despite years' worth of efforts, I can't fix it. I even have a second account that the mini-Reds used to play SWTOR with, and that account has the same damn problem.
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Why bring this up?
Because I wanted to highlight some reasons why I no longer --or hardly ever-- play some MMOs that really don't end up on people's reviews or blog posts about the games.
Petty? Maybe. They're definitely not in the realm of "I just don't like the direction the story is going" or "the combat is clunky".
Accurate? For me, absolutely.
Since I've already mentioned SWTOR, let's delve into a few others...
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Age of Conan's issue is simple: lack of responsiveness when pressing a button.
For all of the issues that Age of Conan has, and believe me, the grindy nature and the bugs do factor into anybody's ability to play the game, the main reason why I don't play Age of Conan anymore has to do with the game's lack of responsiveness when you go to select an action.
Maybe it's because my first MMO was World of Warcraft, which is famous for its smooth user interaction, but there's more to it than just that. Almost every other MMO has no delay between pushing a button and performing the action on screen, but Age of Conan somehow manages to have a noticeable delay between when you select a combat action and your toon actually performing said action. Combat itself is straightforward: you select a certain combo of buttons and then your toon performs the action, but there's just enough of a delay between the selection and the action that makes you think that there's lag in the system. This happened when I first tried the game out back in 2010 or so, and it persisted through the years even though all other MMOs I've played have overcome any lag issues with respect to combat. It's not even a matter of the couple of servers left in AoC being located far away, as they appear to be located in Newark, New Jersey, and the latency I was seeing was around 100 ms. I've played other MMOs with a 100 ms latency without any issues at all, so I don't believe it's the latency either. I think it has to do with the lack of optimization in AoC's code, and for me that's a deal breaker when you're expected to perform more and more complex maneuvers quickly.
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Lord of the Rings Online's UI is a nightmare for visibility.
As much as some people want modern screen sizes to be supported by LOTRO, I want something a bit more basic: more easily readable UI icons.
If there's one thing that MMOs such as WoW and SWTOR have figured out, it's that making unique enough and easily visible buttons in the UI make for a better playing experience. This is something that Standing Stone has yet to figure out, apparently, as every time I boot up LOTRO and login with the intention to do something more than just wander around Bree and listen to the Friday evening band play on the Gladden server, I'm presented with the blasted icons that tell me absolutely nothing at first glance.
Or second or third glance for that matter.
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| From my foray last Spring as a High Elf. |
It's bad enough that they're various shades of red in my example above, but this is what you get if you've been playing for a while:
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| This was my old main on LOTRO. It's been a while since I last played him, and as you can see some commands have been removed and I need to correct things. |
The washed out coloring matches the rest of the LOTRO color scheme, but given that I have to pay close attention to the details of the icons to distinguish between the various red ones and green ones, that does me no favors when performing actions.
And can you imagine the nightmare if you were red-green colorblind? (I'm not, for clarity's sake.)
Then we have to talk about the in game maps.
The maps are kinda sorta faithful to the old Pauline Baynes map of Middle-earth (my own copy was passed down to me from my mom, and I gave it to my son):
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| I was surprised to find that museoteca has an interactive map on their site. This was the map that inspired my exploration into SF&F. |
The thing is, there's a difference between being faithful to the original map and making an in-game map actually usable:
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| This is light years better than what it used to be, but even when I had a smaller monitor nothing was sharp. |
The original map design was much worse, where everything was washed out brownish colors, and trying to distinguish details was... poor at best. And the quest markers? They were all various colors of rings (for The One Ring) but they were too hazy and poorly placed to make any details out either.
I know that I was looking forward to an overhaul of the UI (as was Wilhelm Arcturus), but more for overall improvements of the clarity of the design. Until then, why bash my head against a wall (metaphorically speaking) when I try to play the game? In as much the same way as I love SWTOR's story, LOTRO's story is extremely well done, and I miss being able to progress in it, but for me it's not worth it to keep playing in earnest when I have these visual issues.
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Doom and other FPS games have a "simple" problem: I get nauseous when I play them.
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| From Memecrunch and Step Brothers. |
I know I'm not the only one out there that gets motion sick when playing some types of video games, and there's articles out there with advice on how to deal with the problem (such as this one). Still, the only way I've been able to successfully combat this motion sickness is to use Dramamine in the same fashion that I'd take Dramamine before riding on a train or a plane.
Still, I made the decision a long time ago that if I was going to have to be medicated in order to play a video game, I probably shouldn't be playing said video game. It does save me money in the long run, as I don't purchase FPS games, but it does make me sad that I can't play a specific class of video games.
I recently discovered --much to my horror-- that the NASA Moonbase Alpha video game gave me the same motion sickness as FPS shooters did, so what looks like a rather good lunar base simulation is sadly unplayable for me. Thankfully it's free to play, so I didn't lose any money buying it only to discover I can't play it, but still it's a tough pill to swallow.
*I'm pulling this out of my archives just so you know why you shouldn't want to have your game compared to TERA:
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| Uh, yeah. Interesting enemies you got there. |
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| And no, I'm not posting a pic of the Elin. I have standards. |
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