Looking Over Your Shoulder

There are days when I feel like I'm the last person to know anything at all in our corner of MMO space.

Oh sure, I pick up on big items fairly quickly*, but some of the lesser exposed items tend to pass me by. Perhaps it's due to my ignore factor set high enough to not go bananas every time a game company acts like, well, like the part of Corporate America it is**, but I refuse to respond to that sort of clickbait.

But this rolling of the eyes and moving on with my life has led me to miss some important activity happening in gamer space.

Such as this article from Kotaku about stalkers in streamer space.

On the face of it, the concept of stalkers being out there on the internet isn't exactly a new one. I grew up prior to the Internet Age, and I remember quite well the almost laughable advice given to teens and tweens in the late 80s and early 90s about protecting yourself from stalkers. To say that it was on the level of "Just Say No"*** is doing an injustice to the old anti-drug campaign itself. Still, like a stopped clock being right twice a day, there were some good pieces of advice sprinkled in, such as never assuming you know who is on the other end of a chat.

However, the age of streamers and Influencer culture has warped the old advice a bit: people know who the stalker is, but feel they have little power against them.

The nature of social media has sharpened and enhanced the ability of stalkers --particularly those who have a built in audience-- to wield a lot of power. And if someone threatens their power, the social media feeding frenzy they can unleash can be terrifying.

So people the stalkers seek out keep silent.

I don't have any real answers to this conundrum, because often the only way to combat this sort of power is with power, and stalkers deliberately minimize this sort of reaction because they prey on the powerless. About the best advice I have to anyone is to be a friend to people. Listen to them. Don't assume, and keep an open mind.

And most importantly, believe them when they come to you with a problem --any problem, really-- but especially stalkerish issues.





*Activision-Blizzard job cuts, for instance.

**Basically every "[insert game company here] MUST PAY!!" article or posting or video. I've worked in Corporate America for decades now, so cry me a river when a company behaves like any other company in that world. You want that to change? Good luck with that, because the concept of shareholder primacy has been around since the late 1970s/early 1980s. People much more powerful than I have been trying to break the stranglehold shareholder primacy has on the market without much effect. I suspect it'll take an economic shock for that to happen, and if the Great Recession can't do it, then I doubt some YouTubers will.

***Yes, I'm old enough that I had to sit in class and watch Nancy Reagan's videos for a full week about saying no to drugs. That was a week of my life I'm never getting back.

And That was That

Between work and home life, it's been a busy couple of weeks. However, I have finally finished up the last of the three faction storylines for ESO, which means I've completed "Vanilla" Elder Scrolls Online.*

I have plenty of thoughts to unpack, but I figured I'd get something off my chest now: for a 3 faction MMO, I'd have expected the "enemy" of each faction to be equally represented in the faction storylines.

But it isn't.

This isn't exactly a spoiler, given that we're talking the 500 mile view, but the the factions and their "main" enemies are as follows:

• Ebonheart Pact: A lot of Daggerfall Covenant early on, a bit of Aldmeri Dominion, topped off with the Worm Cult.
• Daggerfall Covenant: A bit of Aldmeri Dominion early on, a lot of Daedric Cults and Ravenloft**, and the Imperials.
• Aldmeri Dominion: A lot of civil war, some Covenant interference, more Daedric Cults, and finally the Imperials.

Do you see what's missing?

The Ebonheart Pact is not noticed very much in the storylines for the other two factions. Oh, there's the occasional quest hub that has "Pact pirates" or something similar, but 90+% of those turned out to be House Telvanni, which isn't a signer of the Ebonheart Pact at all. There's really only one quest hub that stands out to me that the Pact itself are the bad guys, and that's about it.

That's not to say that the Daggerfall and Aldmeri questlines are inferior to the Ebonheart Pact's, because they're not. Each has their own theme about keeping an alliance together throughout difficult times, and with all three factions there are zone quests that definitely fall under the title of "tragedy". Still, with the Pact reduced to basically background noise on the other factions' storylines, I do wonder how this plays into PvP.

I've seen enough PvP over the years to know that if you don't get some good natural antagonism going between the factions it's going to be pretty hard for people to buy into the concept of PvP. With the Pact, you've got ample evidence of how bad the other two factions are, so there's little hold you back yelling "For the Pact!" heading into a PvP match. But with, say, Daggerfall, if you're up against Pact enemies, my reaction would be "Oh look, some pirates!" rather than "There's my hated enemy!"

There, I got that off my chest, and now I can investigate Craglorn prior to jumping into Morrowind.






*Somewhere in the middle of all this, I picked up the lead-in questlines for Morrowind, Summerset, and Murkmire. I finished Morrowind and Murkmire, but I've decided to complete Morrowind's story first before finishing Summerset's lead-in questline.

**If you get the reference, that is. Seriously, look it up; it's a great setting for D&D.

The Churn Goes On...

Blogs come and go. More often than not, they tend to simply fade away as real life or other factors step in and demand more of the blogger's time.

This time it's different.

Gevlon has decided to retire his Greedy Goblin blog after deciding that the MMO arena has no more space for people who want to get better:

"Players no longer need to be any good to progress. They just have to log in and open their wallets. The morons and slackers who couldn’t clear Karhazan back in the day, now clear all the content, because it’s tailored for their pathetic performance. They don’t have to learn anything to succeed, so learning became “tryhard”. They became the dominant culture in gaming. Being any good became “elitism”. “Gamers are dead” is the new slogan among developers. And don’t even get me started about mobile crap.

As a result, any kind of good information is rejected and actively hated. When I found how to get to the toplist of PUBG, all I got were downvotes and hate from the “community”, for ruining their “fun” of mindlessly killing each other. When I disproved the bizarre conspiracy theory that baddies made up in World of Warships to explain their defeats, I got banned from the game’s subreddit. And let’s not even mention CCP Falcon and his antics.

There is no more point in trying to play well, so there is no point writing about it. So people stopped doing so. There were no one left for inspiration. The remaining gaming blogs are personal adventures and maybe game reviews, but not teaching anything about games. Blogging in general went nosedive, giving way to “streamers”, acting in clown (or slut) costumes for money.

I tried longer than most. I hoped that the tide will turn. But it’s time for me to accept that my hobby went the way of television: once an intelligent entertainment, now targeted to the lowest common denominator.

There is no point continuing this blog, so I stop. I will keep playing games, for my own entertainment, using self-imposed (scrub) limits to challenge myself, but there is no value writing about it."

Sure, there's plenty of Gevlon's signature style of disparaging the 'morons and slackers' in this snippet from his post, but I don't think that Gevlon's basic premise is completely correct. There's plenty of people out there trying to win at MMOs, and they share some of Gevlon's drive, but what I think has changed is what it means to "win". 

Gevlon's goals were straightforward: amass tons of gold; win enough matches to get onto leaderboards, be on progression raiding guilds that kill off raid bosses with ease, etc. Those are easily defined and have metrics you can track. But when "winning" becomes less associated with those goals and more with "are you having fun?", then the singleminded purpose of "winning" changes. 

Or, in Gevlon's case, he has been around long enough to see his blog made functionally obsolete by the video game industry.

***

I'll be honest in that while I respected Gevlon's work, I never really thought much of him as a person. He had no time for the aforementioned 'morons and slackers', and while I understand where he's coming from, I don't believe in ripping people a new asshole just because I don't agree with them. Yes, I'm aware it used to be a shtick that Gevlon adopted with the Goblin persona, but I believe that ship sailed long ago and we're now seeing the person behind the Gevlon persona.

I'd imagine that Gevlon really doesn't care what I --or anyone else, for that matter-- think. Still, words do matter, and if you talk and act like an insufferable ass, then don't be surprised if people react to your posts (on your blog, your comments, or Reddit for that matter) as if you're an ass.

All that aside, another voice from the MMO gamer space has gone the way of the Dodo. Nobody will truly replace Gevlon because he was so unique, and love him or hate him, Gevlon did demand your attention.

Hammer of the Dunmer

I have a favorite playlist that I've rather loosely defined as Epic Music. Yes, it contains MMO music, but it also contains soundtracks from other video games (such as Dragon Age or Baldur's Gate) as well as pieces from movie/television soundtracks (such as Yeager's Triumph from The Right Stuff).

It's one of the playlists that I take on my mp3 player*, and I periodically add to it as I stumble across new music.

Two of the more recent additions are the two official expansions for the Elder Scrolls Online, Morrowind and Summerset. Given how the vanilla version of Elder Scrolls Online is okay but nothing special, I wasn't expecting to add music from the two expacs to my playlist.

But here they are.

The login screen for ESO, which included my introduction to the game, is Even Paradise has Shadows, from the Summerset expac:

As this was my introduction to ESO, it has become my resident ESO earworm to the same extent that the intro screen for WoW's Wrath of the Lich King was. I specifically bought the CD for Wrath just to hear that intro screen again a year after Cataclysm dropped, and I remain fond of it to this day. Even then, I was starting to get a bit sick of Wrath's intro music by the time Cataclysm dropped. Even Paradise has Shadows hasn't reached that level yet, but I'm starting to look forward to the Elsweyr expac for a musical change.

But by far my favorite piece of the two ESO expacs is A Land of War and Poetry, from the Morrowind expac:

The intro to the piece has a chorus, dramatic horns, and a clash of percussion and cymbals reminiscent of the intro to The Fellowship of the Ring. the music then softens to a hush, as a violin solo evokes an almost Celtic feel. The music slowly builds from there until Jeremy Soule's classic Morrowind theme makes an appearance for a dramatic conclusion.

If you'd have told me the title and let the music play without knowing the game behind the piece, until the Morrowind theme appeared you could argue that this was a piece of music meant to evoke Scotland. It may not have highland pipes in it, but the title A Land of War and Poetry pretty much describes the Scots --particularly the Scots from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment-- spot on.**

The irony was that I went into ESO blind, so had no idea of what the backstabbing and infighting among the Great Houses of the Dunmer were like, and I had no idea what sort of person (God?) that Vivec was, either. So while the title of the piece correctly evokes the Dunmer and Morrowind, for me it evokes something quite different.

And that's perfectly fine with me, because I can create my own mental imagery when listening to the music, rather than relying upon the video game to provide it for me.

EtA: I should mention where the title for this post came from. It is a reference to Hammer of the Scots, which is one of the nicknames of Edward I of England, who was King of England during the First Scottish War of Independence. It is also the name of a boardgame from Columbia Games that covers the conflict.





*Yes, I still have one of those. The decoder chip on my sturdy old Sansa Fuze is superior to the decoders found on phones and even the iPod Classic. Hey, I'd prefer lossless as much as the next person, but I bought the player when streaming wasn't much of a high quality sound option. Yes, it's that old.

**You could also make an argument for Ireland, but I went with Scotland and the poetry of Robert Burns.

But It's Important to ME!

"You want me to reset your password? Now? It's the middle of the night on a Saturday, and there's no emergency going on."

"Yes, I need it now!"

"There's no change going on right now for your server! This is not important! It can wait until Monday!"

"But it's important to ME!"

--A (paraphrased) exchange an ex-coworker of mine had with someone who paged him awake at 3 AM to change the person's password. Because he decided that working overnight on a Saturday was more important than my co-worker's sleep. (Yes, the guy got reprimanded for abusing the system.)


I have a t-shirt that is older than the mini-Reds.

It's not a rock concert t-shirt*, it's not from a museum or Con or something, and it isn't anything of particular importance. This shirt just happened to last for a long time, and I use it when I'm working around the house and don't mind getting a stain on it. Like, say, if I'm making tomato sauce.** It has also managed to avoid getting paint on it after all this time, and I'm not exactly sure how that minor miracle occurred. However, if you hold the shirt up to the light you can see that in spots it is so thin that I can see through it.

Why do I keep the shirt? Just because it works. It fits me, I don't have to worry about being neat when I'm wearing it, and it's a connection to a time before kids (and before our first house). 

Likewise, I'm occasionally given to hanging onto something in a video game "just because".

When I play one of the Civ-esque games, instead of upgrading/replacing all of my units I'll hang onto one or two of my initial units as a sort of "museum" of where my Civ has come from, in much the same way that the US Navy still has the USS Constitution as an active naval vessel. Those units serve absolutely no purpose in the game, and if I were to press them into service it's likely the endgame for my civilization.

But.... Those units were important to me, because of what they represented.

I also have a habit of preserving the original gear that a new toon in an MMO or RPG, purely for sentimental purposes. I'm not a pack rat***, but some gear or items I never want to sell off. The class weapons you receive in WoW are a great example of this, but also is your first lightsaber in SWTOR. Or the cloak that you received after completing the Shadows of Angmar campaign in LOTRO.

I'm also the guy who will use the original mount received in game as long as possible, until circumstances dictate I use faster transportation (such as keeping people waiting at a world boss location). Perhaps a bit of vainglory is involved there, as I prefer to not wave and shout "look at me!" when I'm out and about in a game world.

Which was kind of the point of the Celestial Steed, the so-called Sparkle Pony when it was a WoW cash shop item back in Wrath days.

I never bought one, so I had to go
rely upon sharing one of the numerous
screencaps from WoWHead. (This one was
by Toknahtar.)

Yeah, I'm not keen those sort of shenanigans.

***

But enough about me, what about you? What do you hang onto --or not-- because it's important to you personally? Because of some sentimental attachment?

*The last one of that ilk was from The Who's 1989 tour, and that bit the dust a long time ago.

**I may enjoy food, but come on. I'm not buying a chef's jacket or bothering with an apron.

***Others might argue, but in my defense I'm never quite sure what might come in handy in a game until at least one playthrough (or at least I get far enough away in level from the gear) that I can then sell off some items in my bank or backpack. All it takes is for you to realize you were supposed to hold onto ONE item that will turn you into a semi-hoarder.

Same as It Ever Was

Eventually I'm going to get a post or two out that hasn't been superseded by surprising news.

But there's this:

Activision Blizzard Lays Off Hundreds Of Employees

Jason Schreier broke this again.
From the story on Kotaku.

I see that Activision is now behaving just like any other company that looks at "how can I keep investors happy this quarter?" and decides slicing headcount is the best method of "orienting for growth".

But here's the kicker: while Activision hit record revenues in 2018, because they missed their company established targets Activision lowered expectations for 2019 and cut costs instead.

I can almost guarantee that Activision's products will attempt to double down on lootboxes and microtransactions to attempt to milk the player base in a cheap-to-implement solution that --in corporate speak-- results in a win-win. I also believe that cutting non-development costs means that support will see a hit, and it's likely that BlizzCon will be scaled back (because putting on a con costs money).

On The Positive Power of Gaming

I was finishing something else for the blog when I came across this new post on BBC News* about what gaming --particularly WoW-- meant to the disabled son of Oslo's vice-mayor of finance.

Mats Steen died in 2014, but his funeral was attended by members of his WoW guild, people whom Mats' parents had never met before. The article shares the story about how Mats fell ill, how he discovered gaming, and what the connections meant to everyone involved.

Mats' father, Robert, next to a pic of Mats'
toon, Ibelin. URL from the BBC article.

The article was originally written in Norwegian, and if you want to read that, the link is here.

I'll freely admit that I got all the feels from the article. I laughed when a guildmate of Mats', Lisette, met Mats for the first time. In Goldshire. And then there was the time Mats was in the hospital, and his guildmates grew concerned.

For the most part, however, I understood Mats in a way that prior to 2009 would have been foreign to me.

My access to the internet, and before that to online services such as GEnie, led me to online communities** that I grew to know and respect, but I never exchanged cards with anyone from those groups. I never connected with them offline, shared in their adventures with their families, exchanged pics of family members (including the four legged ones), and kept up with their personal lives.***

But I did to my fellow MMO gamers and bloggers.

That sense of community, of family, is what Mats experienced. He also experienced freedom that he was unable to achieve in real life, running and jumping, and also the freedom from judgment that comes from living with a disability.

Go and read the article, and grab some tissues while you're at it. And celebrate some of the best parts of gaming.





*Yes, I do read news outside of the US. That's an aftereffect of being a shortwave listener and being a member of my university's Model UN Club. Model UN, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a club where we simulate a committee or the General Assembly of the UN on a particular topic. We follow the UN rules for public discussion, and each person selects (or has selected for them) a country to represent on that particular topic. You can't just fudge things (much), you actually have to research the country's position on said topic. Our club also hosted a conference for high school/secondary school students to send a "delegation" to, representing a specific country across many different committees (from the General Assembly to the World Health Organization to the Security Council). The year I was to lead one of those committees, I ran the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, and while I wasn't expecting a very vigorous discussion, a few months before our conference was to take place Iraq invaded Kuwait. While the topics we covered were already set, the OIC managed to finish official business early enough that we were able to devote an hour or two to "the elephant in the room".

**Shout out to soc.history.medieval, one of the old USENET newsgroups that I used to hang out in.

***I did meet with a fellow member of the Cincinnati Bengals newsgroup for lunch back in the Fall of 2005, the year the Bengals made the playoffs for the first time since 1991. Unfortunately, the fellow Bengals fan passed away from cancer before that playoff game, so while he was able to see the Bengals make the playoffs he wasn't able to actually witness the game itself. He was a very gregarious person, with a shock of white hair and wearing an old style Bengals jacket, but the impression he made on me ran deeper than that. He asked me if I wrote for a living, and when I told him I worked in IT, he said that I really need to start writing. "I love your posts," he said.

Not a Bang but a Whimper

I got on Rift the other day, in the early evening. Alas, I felt I was the only one there.

I went around the Defiant's capital city, and much to my chagrin I found only one other person hanging around. Surely, I thought, this is a mistake, so I went out into some of the low level zones and barely encountered another soul.

Well, if Gamigo thought they were going to get an active MMO, they've gotten quite a wake up call.

Even Wildstar and Marvel Heroes were more active than this before their shutdown announcements. (As is ArcheAge, which is often linked to being not long for the world.)

But this.... This just makes me sad.

You can say that the Trion's P2W strategy killed Rift, but what truly seems to have driven a stake in the game was selling the game to Gamigo. While I'll freely admit I could have logged in at just the exact wrong time, but it was truly disheartening to see what was a vibrant game turned into an empty shell.

It feels like only yesterday that Rift was in it's Beta, and disaffected WoW fans were leaving Cataclysm and giving the game a very serious look. I remember getting a Beta key and poking around the starter zones, thinking that although there were Beta issues the game seemed incredibly polished with a really good story to build upon.

And now... Well, I don't see much future for Rift. The dragons have won.

Okay, who thought this all the way through?

"Bother," said Pooh.

There's a lot that's interesting about the Elsweyr expac for Elder Scrolls Online, but one big part of the expac is, to be quite frank, a head scratcher: the new class, Necromancer.

It was as if the devs had never heard of the Main Questline, or Molag Bal for that matter.

I mean, the devs do know that you're fighting the undead (among other Daedric nasties), right? Why on earth would you want to create a class that is exactly what you are currently trying to remove from Tamriel?

And what would the (so-called) "Good" Daedric Princes (among them Meridia and Azura) think about your devotion to re-animating corpses?

At least if you cast Necromantic spells in cities you're going to run afoul of the law, but that's a minor consolation to throwing a monkey wrench to the entire game's storyline.

You Know What this Game Needs....

...A Battle Royale mode!!

No, not WoW or SWTOR or any other game I've played regularly, but rather Black Desert Online.

Of all the complaints that I've heard about BDO --mostly centered around the Pay2Win nature of its cash shop*-- I haven't heard the need for a Battle Royale mode. About the closest there is to a Battle Royale mode in any MMO is Outlaw's Den in SWTOR, and you can tell when someone is trolling for people to show up in Outlaw's Den just to gank them by the wheedling they do in zone chat.

But this, in BDO? Really?

If there's a game whose setting almost directly implies Battle Royale, it's Age of Conan's Hyborea. "Every man for himself" is pretty much a credo that you find in a lot of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and by extension a Battle Royale mode would work well there. You'd also need to add a few extras, such as Mad Wizards or Atlantean Artifacts, to make it more truly in Conan's vein, but at least the game world/players would be receptive of the idea.

This announcement, however, just implies "cash grab" and I can't see it lasting very long.





*Which seems to be much more of a theme on Asian MMOs (and Rift) than on Western MMOs, which focus primarily on accessories or clothing.


EtA: corrected a grammatical error.

News and Notes for the New Year

I haven't intentionally gone silent after the New Year's Day, but work and family conspired against any updates until now. It's not like I've stopped playing games --I've played quite a bit, thankyouverymuch-- but my traditional blogging time has been taken up by other items. However, I did want to mention a couple of items that were MMO related.

***

Bethesda had a major announcement on January 15th, announcing the next ESO expac to be the home of the Khajiit, Elsweyr. I kind of expected the expac to be a homeland territory, given that Summerset and Morrowind covered the Altmer and Dunmer, and I also knew that Black Marsh was already covered as a purchasable DLC. The addition of dragons, however, did catch me by surprise.

And, to be honest, I was really amused.

Although the name Elsweyr is pronounced "Elsewhere", it's a space away from the name of a settlement of Dragonriders of Pern*, whose places are known as weyrs. Between the obvious naming similarities and the references to dragons, I can only imagine that we might see a surreptitious homage to Anne in the expac.

***

After the brouhaha at BlizzCon with the Diablo mobile game announcement, I noticed that a ton of "Blizzard is dying" "WoW is dying" "Activision is killing Blizzard" videos popped up in my YouTube feed.

I'm not one to say that the sky is falling, but I'm sure that to some hardcore fans, Activision is the new EA.** Between the disaster of the Fallout 76 release and Blizzard's internal and external problems, it seems that no AAA developer is immune these days. I've said for a while now that a lot of these problems are brought on by the incessant need to post upward trending quarterly results for investors, forcing development houses to push out games that aren't ready.

Another way at looking at the drive for more profit is to view Bungie's split from Activision in that light. Bungie feuded with Activision over the "annualized schedule" of releasing major expacs/updates annually --the annual CoD release concept brought to the Destiny platform-- and by maintaining complete control over the game Bungie can release new content when they feel an expac is ready. Why the annualized schedule in the first place? Well, Activision wanted to keep profits up, and annual release schedules guarantee (more or less) steady sales. Activision blamed their latest slow quarter on Bungie, which Bungie didn't take too kindly toward. And now that the split with Bungie has been announced, investors have launched an investigation into whether Activision engaged in securities fraud.

From a developer's standpoint, Bungie's split with Activision made perfect sense. From an investor's standpoint, however, a company they invested in --and expected to generate regular profits-- is losing a major franchise after having shuttered another major franchise (Skylanders), along with (supposed) poor performance of one of the jewels of the company (WoW). So it's not a big surprise that investors are now upset.

If this were any normal publicly traded company, I'd start to expect layoffs to "stabilize the bottom line". But this is still Activision Blizzard, so I have no idea whether the Blizzard side will finally start standing up for itself against Bobby Kotick. I'd not necessarily count on it, but I'm surprised that Activision let Bungie go, so you never know.

As 2019 rolls on, stay tuned. I'm sure this isn't the last we've heard from these events.




*By Anne McCaffrey. Some of the behavior behind the first two books, Dragonflight and Dragonquest, don't hold up in today's world vs. the early 70s when the first two books were written. Dragonflight was, in fact, three novellas published separately and then put into a single book.

**And we'll have someone pop in with a comment about how much worse EA is in three... two... one...


EtA: Corrected the name of Elsweyr. That's what I get for typing while tired.

Two Down, One to Go

I finished the Daggerfall Covenant questline playthrough on my main last night, making that two of the three factions completed in Elder Scrolls Online. While I still have another entire faction's quests to run through, I found the following interactions between factions interesting:

• Ebonheart Pact -- Attacked/invaded by Daggerfall Covenant, Attacked by strike teams of Aldmeri Dominion
• Daggerfall Covenant -- Attacked by strike teams of Aldmeri Dominion

And that's it. A slaver ship that sells slaves to House Telvanni is involved in one localized quest location, but Telvanni isn't part of the Ebonheart Pact. There's also another "spy" episode in which House Telvanni is implicated, but again the Ebonheart Pact again comes up clean when it comes to interfaction fighting in the questlines.

I have to wonder whether this observation holds up with the Aldmeri Dominion, so we'll see.

One last item of notice: High King Emeric came off as a conniving asshole in the three faction meeting that leads to the Coldharbour section of the questline, and I was willing to bet that he looked much better to a member of the Daggerfall Covenant itself. After having played through the entire Daggerfall Covenant questline, I can conclude that yes, he does come off much better in that questline, but he also still comes off as an asshole in that cross faction meeting.

Oh well. Some people never change.

A Musical Friday Post

In case a prior post didn't make it plain, I'm a fan of Stardew Valley.* Therefore, when The Doubleclicks posted this cover of the Stardew Valley Theme, I knew I had to post this.

*Who did I marry? Penny, although I seriously considered Leah.

The 16 Year Itch

The oldest mini-Red is back home for winter break after her finals*, and practically the first thing she did after arriving was to get together with some friends to go play SWTOR.

Although this isn't the Smuggler I've heard
so much about, I've been told that the Mini-Red's
friends created toons that would qualify for the
Fashion Hall of Shame on the Hawtpants of the
Old Republic blog.

I must have done something right.

***

Our main PC, the one I use for gaming, is over six years old now. At the time, the i7-3770 was pretty much the best processor you could buy, and while I skimped on a few other parts of the build I definitely made sure the processor would last. And last it has.

However, that also means that the hard drive and other components are six years old as well, and I've grown a bit nervous about the hard drive in particular. Sure, I back up data to an external drive on a regular basis, but if you've ever had to deal with a hard drive crash it's not what I'd call fun. Therefore, I'm looking at replacing the hard drive with an SSD and adding another HDD for the pictures/movies/whatever storage.

That ought to keep the PC active and running for a while.

However --and you knew this was coming, right?-- I'm planning on building a replacement over the course of the next year or two. Not to replace the main PC in general, as it'll be perfectly fine for what my wife uses** for the next 4-5 years at least, but a separate PC that I'll be able to use for gaming going forward.

I have a small confession to make: I've not built a PC from scratch since Windows XP was the current version of Windows.

I used to build and rebuild PCs back through the 90s, mainly to keep our old 386/SX20 486DX33 486SX66 going, and yes, I was one of those people who would spend hours perusing the telephone directory sized Computer Shopper on a monthly basis. However, after the Windows XP machine's motherboard failed in 2007 I priced out the cost of replacing it directly with a prebuilt vs. building it myself, and I was surprised to find that it was more cost efficient to just buy a computer with Windows and MS Office already installed as opposed to building one myself.

Yes, I know that in general this is still the case, but after dealing with the HP Phoenix for the past six years, I think I'm ready to go back to building one myself. The reasons are pretty straightforward:

• I control what goes in the machine.
  
  I didn't realize just how much I missed controlling the hardware when I was trying to see if I could tweak the system. The machine has all the prerequisites for handling overclocking, except for the motherboard. If it were me selecting the components, I'd have bought a motherboard that could handle overclocking. I might not have tweaked anything, but I prefer having the option to do so.
  
• The price of MS Office isn't a limiting factor any more.
  
  Since Microsoft is pushing people into MS Office 365 as a subscription service, I've been moving in the direction of using either OpenOffice or Google Drive. I've no reason to get a new version of MS Office when Office 2010 on the main PC still works and I've got free options.
  
• The cost versus performance of the components hasn't changed that much over time.
  
  Back when I last built a PC, the performance of the components kept changing drastically on a yearly basis. In 1999, I bought one of the first AMD Athlon PCs, and for a brief period of time I owned one of the fastest PCs in the world. Three months later that was no longer the case. After 2-3 years, the Athlon was showing its age to the point where it wasn't keeping up with the new games at all.
  
  The i7-3770, however, is in a different situation. Three years after it was built, it was still a fine performer. And now, six years after it was built, it has finally slipped off the recommended requirements for the latest games. We're not talking the minimum requirements, but the recommended requirements. By contrast, that old Athlon was off the minimum requirements for a lot of games by 2005-6.
  
  Why the change? Advances in processing power have come at a more incremental rate, especially the last several years, and AMD's Ryzen architecture has propelled them back into the performance game with Intel and given PC builders a good alternative to Intel at a great price for performance. Intel may still be the gamers' processor of choice, but AMD is now a viable option, particularly once their 7 nm Ryzen 3rd Gen architecture ships in 2019.

Given all this, I've started getting the itch to build a PC once again. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to start perusing the enthusiast web sites/YouTube Channels while I dream a little.

*Finals are stressful for anybody, but for a Music Performance major, the jury cranks the stress levels up to 11. For the uninitiated, a jury is a performance you give before either the entire department or a significant number of them that determines whether they believe you fit enough to continue progressing in your music career. Think of it as a Masters' Thesis defense, but every semester, and you get the idea.

**And for gaming in general.

You're Almost Old Enough to Drink

Twenty years ago on December 21st, 1998, a computer RPG by a little known software company named BioWare was released to the world. That computer RPG would go on to revolutionize and revive the Western style RPG.

Happy birthday, Baldur's Gate!

One of the many classic lines from Baldur's Gate.

And another....

And the source of the best quotes in the

game, Minsc (and Boo)!

Because Walking into a Throne Room in Full Plate is Just Normal

Silk and Barack stood in the corner, talking quietly. Barack was hugely splendid in a green brocade doublet, but looked uncomfortable without his sword. Silk's doublet was a rich black, trimmed in silver, and his scraggly whiskers had been carefully trimmed into an elegant short beard.

"What does all of this mean?" Garion asked as he joined them.

"We're to be presented to the king," Barack said, "and our honest clothes might have given offense. Kings aren't accustomed to looking at ordinary men."

Durnik emerged from one of the rooms, his face pale with anger. "That overdressed fool wanted to give me a bath!" he said in choked outrage. "

It's the custom," Silk explained. "Noble guests aren't expected to bathe themselves. I hope you didn't hurt him."

"I'm not a noble, and I'm quite able to bathe myself," Durnik said hotly. "I told him I'd drown him in his own tub if he didn't keep his hands to himself. After that, he didn't pester me any more, but he did steal my clothes. I had to put these on instead." He gestured at his clothes, which were quite similar to Garion's. "I hope nobody sees me in all this frippery."

--Pawn of Prophecy, by David Eddings


One thing I've puzzled about over the years is how a toon in an MMO (or RPG) interacts with leadership in-game. Now, I don't mean the local constable or even some minor noble, but rather a titular head of government or a leader of the military*.

Unless you're starting off as some sort of noble (or ex-noble), a character in an MMO or RPG is simply not important enough to draw the attention of any ruler of any game universe. Now, if the size of the ruler's country is tiny, yeah, there's a better than average change that Durek The Smasher might actually have met the King of Tinyacropolis.** However, given the insularity frequently found separating the nobles/upper class from the common folk, your not very likely to have any real interaction between the classes other than in a master/servant (or worse) situation; drinking with Prince Hal ala Shakespeare's two Henry IV plays ain't very likely, and even if it did happen Prince Hal would deny it did happen once he ascended to the throne.

So why does your toon end up hanging around kings, queens, Great Mages/Wizards, and other leaders of the world?***

***

I've mentioned in the (far distant) past that I consider this scenario --found in MMOs from LOTRO to WoW to SWTOR and ESO-- something that you see right out of David Eddings' series The Belgariad. The story revolves around the most powerful people in the game world, the faction leaders and whatnot, and they go off and have adventures along with any protagonists/narrators.

While I really love The Belgariad --having read it as a middle school student right as it was released-- I do recognize that the main players in the story really shouldn't be doing what they're doing at all, and instead having other people do the work for them. Think about it this way: if you were at a university, how likely would it be that the best football player were a cousin of the President, your advisor is Elon Musk, your Resident Assistant is a combination of Black Widow and Jeff Bezos, and you happen to be dating Beyonce and Jay Z's daughter? Oh, and that all of these people are incognito, too?

Yeah, I thought not.

But at the same time, this sort of thing eventually ends up happening in a lot of MMOs and RPGs. And that's not even counting the Mary Sue-ism aspect of your toon, either, rising over the course of a very short time to being the counselor and best friend of the most powerful people around.

This whole scenario is pretty damned unlikely to me.

When the Skeptical Kid meme has more
caution than Amalexia or Emeric.

***

I thought about this situation a bit after having finished the original ESO storyline for the Ebonheart Pact, and since I'm about a bit over halfway through the storyline for the Daggerfall Covenant this has been really bugging me more and more. You don't go from being a nobody to the King's trusted confidant and advisor that quickly. Hell, it's more likely that the King would take the credit and give you a token or trinket to essentially pay you to go away. After all, you're not from the upper class.

Think of one of the basic quest types that you find in an MMO: the delivery of a letter. Think of what is behind such a simple quest:

• The ability to read.
  
  In a SF or modern setting, the assumption that everybody reads (or reads well enough) holds, but in a medieval setting that is not likely the case. If you're middle class or upper class, then yes, but if you're lower class...
  
• The amount of trust the quest giver has in handing you the letter.
  
  This kind of goes without saying, but someone who "just shows up" and is given a letter to pass along sounds a bit fishy. Would you entrust a letter to a relative stranger? Would you simply stop a passerby and give them a letter to deliver? Or better yet, deliver tidings to the King? If you are truly a loyal subject of the King, why would you trust a delivery to someone who you may have fought a few battles with, but before that nothing was known?
  
• The ability to even deliver the letter in the first place.
  
  It may be one thing to finally reach a destination and deliver a letter to a tradesman or a merchant, but quite another to deliver a letter to a member of the nobility. A tradesman may see you directly, a merchant may make you wait in an outer "office" room before delivery to a secretary or bookkeeper, but a noble? It's must more likely that you'll deliver the letter to a minor functionary, who will in turn hand it over to a courtier or advisor, and then the letter will be delivered to the noble. And if it was going to the King? The King would likely not receive the delivery in public, and if he did, he certainly wouldn't read it in public.

All that means is the simple "delivery" quest has the potential to be completely wrecked by reality.

***

Before you say "Hey Redbeard, you're missing the point. The entire point is to advance the plot and move you up the chain in the circle of nobility," I get it. Before you snort and say "Hey, you're supposed to be The Chosen One (or whatever)," yeah, I understand the why behind it. But to me, the end isn't as important as the journey itself.

If you're going to deliver a letter to a noble and you're not a formal courier, the noble's handlers aren't going to let you close to said noble. If you're as dangerous a person as you're supposed to be, it would be a short matter for you to assassinate a noble if you had that in mind, and believe me, the nobles know that.

Ah, Mel Brooks. You put it so plainly.

Besides, there's the Divine Right of Kings, and even in a Fantasy environment --especially so, given that the gods can be pretty active and direct in a Fantasy setting-- that means the nobility believe they have the supreme right to be where they are, and that anybody not of their ilk had better remember that.

***

Okay, so what's the point?

Well, the point is that a game's story can be better than what it is right now. Just because you don't get to meet with the king directly doesn't mean that the plot is shot to hell; I'd argue that because you have to navigate the bizarro world that is the nobility a story can be made much richer.

Instead of "deliver a letter to the King, who sends you out to deal with the next item on the plot", how about something like this:

• Because of XXX, the courier has no choice but to give you the letter to deliver.
• Along the way, someone tries to kill you or steal said letter.
• Once you arrive, you're
  a) Not Believed and you have to try to prove you are who you say you are
  b) Believed, but you're sent to a room to be cleaned up and presented to a minor functionary who then makes you wait (via cutscene) and he provides you with a quest in return.
• If you perform a few quests right, you're granted an audience with a higher member of the nobility. Maybe that person likes you and maybe not, but more quests are given instead of the King doing it directly.

What this does is provide that obscuring layer between you and the King. You don't know if you're truly acting in the King's interest, and the minor nobles say so, but what if they're the ones plotting against the King? Couldn't they be setting you up to take the blame if their plot fails, and the ire of a nation if it succeeds? Maybe you have to find a way to meet with the King without them acting as a go-between just to make sure. Or should you even trust the King at all? Does he have the interest in his kingdom at heart? Or is maybe your mind playing tricks, and you were the bad guy all along?

All of these little interesting plot points add to the richness of a story and allow the paranoia and class arrogance of the nobility/upper class to improve the story beyond the basics of "deliver a letter to the King".

***

In the end, I suppose, money is the critical part here. All of this extra work in a game means extra money spent on development, and software companies have to choose between plot development and extra time spent on enriching a story. If more time is spent on the main quest line, does that mean the side quests suffer?

Perhaps that's why in ESO at least, the side quests are frequently better written than the main quest line in a zone.

But another reason the way quests are is more a matter of fan service: some people want to play an MMO to see some of the key NPCs in action. A LOTRO fan wants to see Aragorn or Gandalf or Elrond; an Elder Scrolls fan wants to see Vivec; a Warcraft fan wants to pal around with Thrall or Khadgar. And for those fans, the more interaction the better.

I guess that there's no truly easy answer here. But still, I'd at least like to see things a bit more realistic than the current state of quest design.

*Although they are frequently separate in modern times, in prior centuries the leader of the military was also the leader of the country/empire. Sure, in the US the President is also the Commander-in-Chief, but I can't think of a President after Washington who led troops into battle as President.

**Or in a barbarian campaign where there is no overlord for barbarian clans, your clan chief is pretty much it as far as leadership goes.

***It kind of goes without saying that includes gods/goddesses/primal dragons/demons/whatever and their leading support staff.

Maximum Profit for Minimal Effort

I was skipping around on YouTube the other day, going from video to video with no particular rhyme or reason to it, when I came across this video from back in May 2018 by Falcon on Gameranx:

The TL;DR of the video is that EA doesn't understand that people want to play different types of games, and that EA is letting their own desire to promote a steady stream of monetization (via loot boxes and other items) get in the way of what might be really good games. As examples, Falcon pointed to games such as God of War --and tons of Nintendo games-- that were linear in design with a definite ending yet were also extremely popular.

The video was partially in reaction to yet another Star Wars game getting the axe after a lot of prepublication buzz, Visceral Games' untitled Star Wars game developed by Uncharted 1 through 3 Creative Director and writer Amy Henning. The idea that a linear, story based game wasn't going to "keep people coming back to it," paraphrasing EA EVP Patrick Söderlund, is what Falcon believed to be code for utilizing lootboxes and other monetization methods to keep milking the player base. And to be honest, I think he's pretty much dead on here.

The concept that a story driven, linear game wouldn't have people replaying it have honestly never played the Uncharted series, the isometric RPGs of Bioware, and the aforementioned God of War or Nintendo games. But these days, it's all about the money, because the business world is attuned to maximizing quarterly profits.

***

On the face of it, the desire from the major software houses to jack up the monetization by DLC and lootboxes (or even introducing mobile games which have tons of the "cash store" type of stuff) is amusing. After all, I do happen to know a class of video games that are pretty much tailor made for this sort of thing, and I'm betting you do too.

You know... This genre:

Ah, Thrall. Will the Green Jesus save us
with WoW Classic? (From worldofwarcraft.com)

MMOs, that subgenre which is no longer quite so hot these days, is pretty much tailor made to separate gamers from their money on a consistent basis.

MMOs, that subgenre defined by World of Warcraft and their obsessive fans*, toxic world chat, and "the game begins at max level" ethos.

MMOs, that subgenre that game studios are refusing to touch with a ten foot pole.

***

The funny thing is, you can have both a satisfying linear, story-based experience in MMOs as well as a rich, wide-ranging world where you can wander at will (and there's always people who are willing to indulge in a cash store.)

As for the drawback of MMOs, it's the development costs involved. It is much easier to code the next iteration of Call of Duty rather than World of Warcraft. Because MMOs are so all encompassing, their development costs tend to skyrocket. Not so much with the more narrowly defined yet highly profitable annual Madden release.

Cheaper to make than Battle for Azeroth.
I went with Madden 15 because I refuse
to put a Steeler or a Patriot on the cover.
From Wikipedia.

***

In it's own way, EA is confirming the basic business ethos: build cheap, sell dear.** The article I wrote the other day about Blizzard is another pointed comment about the approach of modern software development to cut costs as much as possible and maximize profits any way you can, and here is a (frequently vilified) software development house that chose to eliminate a game that might have sold well but didn't have:

• The latest hotness in game design
• Maximum long term profit potential
• Maximum output for minimal effort

This movement toward a more naked attempt minimize development and maximize costs is starting to remind me a bit of the lead-up to the Great Video Game Crash of the early 80s. Back then, in the interest of cashing in on the video game market, development houses rushed games to production that were cookie cutters in design, cheap to develop, and designed to maximize profit. The market was so flooded with games (and platforms) that people stopped buying new games, creating the push that started the avalanche. While the modern game industry has avoided a similar crash so far, there becomes a point of diminishing returns, particularly when gamers are going to be asked to buy new console platforms in the next couple of years. Eventually there comes a point where people say "okay, that's enough, I'm tired of the BS", and the industry suddenly has major issues.

We're not there yet, but eventually a course correction will happen. People will eventually say --in large enough numbers-- that we're tired of the treadmill and we want something different. And immersive. And something we don't have to continuously pay money for. Nothing lasts forever, but it seems that the major development houses aren't paying attention to that credo while they're laser focused on the next quarter's results.

*Full disclosure, I am one. I may not subscribe right now, but I do like the game. And besides, that comment was fully tongue-in-cheek, because MOBAs are even worse these days.

**Yeah, it's actually "buy cheap and sell dear", but the point is to create a product as cheaply as possible and sell it as high as you can.

Remember the Days of Kill Ten Rats?

I remember playing through my first toon on SWTOR back in 2012, a Smuggler/Gunslinger, and thinking that Bioware didn't hesitate to show the grey morality of the Republic, particularly on Ord Mantell and Belsavis. SWTOR pretty much hit you over the head with that in Ord Mantell with the woman looking for her locket, and the Cathar woman stealing medical supplies for the refugees, not to mention the embedded videographer you're supposed to "rescue" from the Separatists. However, the one thing that I believe SWTOR did shy away from was the usage of tragedy to propel a story forward.

It's not that the Star Wars Universe is incapable of tragedy as a plot device --the television shows and the "Star Wars Story" films show that in spades-- it's just that the emphasis of SWTOR is more on heroism and getting to be the hero in a galaxy divided between Republic and Sith Empire. Despite all the gray, you do have moral choices to make (Light vs.Dark) that are baked into the system, and one of the choices the Bioware devs decided when working on SWTOR was to simply not use tragedy very much.*

Given the nature of the backstory, I expected more of this in Age of Conan, where in Robert E. Howard's stories the secondary (and frequently major) characters would meet untimely ends in the same way that people in H.P. Lovecraft's stories did. The Sword and Sorcery ethos of "magic = things that mankind was not meant to meddle with" pretty much demands it. On the flip side, when major players died in WoW it would frequently feel forced, and for a while most of the major deaths happened offscreen in the novels. The most notable exception for this was the Wrathgate event, which turned everything in Northrend on its head, yet the full event was so well done it felt completely organic to the situation. Anyone with a brain could see the Apothecaries were working on their own "secret projects" since Vanilla, that long game they were playing finally came to fruition two expacs later.

All that being said, The Elder Scrolls Online hasn't really hesitated into utilizing tragedy --and borrowed from a lot of Sword and Sorcery ethos-- to propel a story forward.

Having played the Main Questline through to completion, it was notably absent of much in the way of sacrifice. Yes, I'm aware of the ending, but even then it wasn't much of a sacrifice if you ask me, because I wasn't so invested in those characters. To be honest, I was more invested in their voice actors than the characters themselves. But the zone stories are an entirely different animal.

It is here that I differentiate between the Main Questline and the entire Coldharbour questline. While I suppose it might count as part of the Main Questline, it certainly has more in common with the other Zone Questlines, as the utilization of tragedy is much more common there than in the Main Questline.

I was thinking about the utilization of tragedy as a plot device last night, as I entered into Stormhaven the other day and was finishing up some quests on the western part of the zone. There I ran into yet another tragic outcome (sorry, no spoilers) which got me to thinking that the Elder Scrolls Universe has absolutely no problem utilizing tragedy, particularly when Daedra are involved to any extent. For all the Mary Sue-ism that your toon embodies, and believe me there's quite a bit of that,** the ESO zone stories temper that with things that you can't control and events you can't stop. Even when you're given a quest to make things right, events are never so simple as it seems.

Kill Ten Rats this ain't. More like "Kill Ten Rats, and oopsie, the original questgiver had that wrong, and you really need to do a Fetch and Carry, and uh-oh, maybe this is an Escort quest as well because the original questgiver decided they couldn't wait and got themselves in a crap ton of hot water (sometimes literally). Oh, and there's also a pretty decent chance that the subject of the quest is either in cahoots with the Daedra or is going to be killed by the Daedra or the Daedra had that subject's buddies killed. Rocks all; everyone dies."

ESO Rule for NPCs #1: Unless the Daedric Prince's name is Merida or Azura, don't even bother. Just don't. And if someone promises to make your problems go away, you're screwed, because it's likely a Daedra. Unless it's your toon doing the promising, of course.




*No, I don't have a pipeline to the SWTOR devs, but looking at the result shows that they did avoid tragedy. It's not like Bioware won't use tragedy as a plot device; after all, look at their other games --including KOTOR 1-- as proof otherwise.

**One questgiver says at the completion of a quest that she will erect a statue in your honor, which is more than a wee bit over the top. And really, your toon is trusted by people (commonly known as "your betters") who ordinarily have no business whatsoever trusting a random person who just happens to show up on their doorstep asking if they can help out. From my perspective, that is the laziest part of the writing in the ESO universe; I shouldn't be able to simply waltz up to a Captain of the Guard, much less nobility, and have them simply accept that I'm going to help out and do their heavy lifting. Even the Jedi get less initial traction in SWTOR than your toon does in ESO.

Farewell, Nexus

I won't be seeing this guy again.
The Caretaker zapped him along with
the rest of Nexus

I managed to get online with 5 minutes before shutdown, but my screenshots never took. I wasn't surprised, as the servers were overloaded with people trying to say goodbye.

The Slow Creeping Onslaught of the Bean Counters

Jason Schreier has been busy, following up the Diablo mobile game announcement at Blizzcon 2018 with an indepth article about Diablo, and by extension, Blizzard itself.

The Past, Present, and Future of Diablo dropped on Wednesday, right before Thanksgiving in the US, so it is understandable if you happened to miss it then. But go and read it, then come back here.

I'll wait.

***

Pulling the Diablo expac from development speaks volumes to me. It tells me that upper management was feeling the pressure from the lousy D3 release, and they didn't have confidence that the first D3 expac would right the ship. That was a big departure from Blizzard's previous behavior, where they were willing to wait and work on something before it was good enough to release.

As much as Titan was considered a "failure" by many internally because they never got it across that goal line, it does provide a big peek into Blizzard's thought process. Because Blizzard had the WoW money coming in --as well as a lot of customer goodwill-- Blizzard could afford to throw money at something that ultimately became a "failure", although the release of Overwatch from the ashes of Titan proved that Blizzard could still make a fantastic game from the leftover pieces. I realize that people would argue that Blizzard could afford to do that because of the WoW money, but that ethos was baked into Blizzard's culture from the get-go. The WoW money only allowed Blizzard more space to try to make a failure work.

However, once Activision Blizzard struck out on their own, there was bound to be a culture clash from the two entities as to which vision would ultimate win out.When A-B was part of Vivendi, this sort of clash wasn't necessary because A-B was a small part of the Vivendi conglomerate. When A-B went solo, however, they couldn't afford "poor sales" like they could in the past. So how would this end up?

Well, we do have a previous merger that provides look into the dynamics of how this would work out, and ironically enough it involves two major computer companies, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard.

***

In one corner, there was Compaq; the maker of the first PC clone that challenged the IBM for dominance in the PC space. In the other was HP, which built its reputation first on lab electronics and calculators, and then later on PCs. The two were big players in the PC market, and when HP's Carly Fiorina first announced the merger the business analysts weren't so sure about how the merger would work out, suggesting that the companies didn't complement each other very well. However, in spite of a revolt led by Walter Hewlett, son of one of the two founders Bill Hewlett, Carly got her wish and the merger happened.

The two corporate cultures, however, couldn't be more different. Compaq was very much a "fly by the seat of your pants" outfit that would throw products against the wall to see what would stick and then patch things to make them work, while HP was more ingrained in a slower, methodical, make-sure-it-works-before-releasing style of development, based on openness and trust, the legendary HP Way. (Does this sound familiar?) Perhaps bruised by the revolt and stung by the criticism from analysts, Carly used the merger to throw out most of HP management and replace them with Compaq people, leading to the eventual loss of the HP corporate culture within its own company.

With Activision Blizzard, we are seeing a similar fight appearing. Activision is very much a "release every year with some changes but with a formula that doesn't vary very much" type of outfit. Blizzard works on things until it is perfect enough to release. Alas, the signs don't look good for Blizzard in the long run, as the killing off of the second D3 expac was the first unofficial sign that Blizzard's management was starting to feel the "what have you done for me this quarter?" that seems to infest publicly traded companies the past 3-4 decades. The end of the article, where Blizzard's new finance person has started talking about "cost cutting", is another ominous sign that Blizzard's management is starting to lose its battle to remain independent from direct control by Bobby Kotick's and the bean counters from the Activision side of the company.

***

In my personal opinion, I think it's time for Blizzard to spin off and become a privately held company. They may not need to do it to develop games, but if they want to develop games the way they've always done it, they'll need to be free from the influence of an alien corporate culture (Activision) and the pressure to perform by shareholders (publicly traded on the market). The freedom to fail is a powerful thing, because it leads to risk and innovation. If a company becomes risk adverse and settles for churning out products that vary little from year to year, they may make money but their dreams become smaller, concerned with focus groups and earnings per share and not rocking the boat. If Blizzard wants to continue to dream big, they need to control their own destiny.

The Steam [Don't Call it] Black Friday Sale has Arrived

You know a big sale is going on when I open up my email and find a "25 Items From Your Steam Wishlist are on Sale!" message in there.

I wish the Autumn colors looked like that around
here. It was hot until way late in Fall, and then
suddenly switched over to cold weather, with the
leaves not giving much color at all.

I'm personally debating as to what to do with Steam sale; whether to wait for the Winter Sale or pounce on this one. There are a few games I'd like to nab when they're on sale, such as Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, but there are also some others that I know I'd be tempted to purchase for the mini-Reds.*

Deadfire, because chasing after a rogue
god can be fun. From GameRevolution.

There is the Pathfinder: Kingmaker game out there that I'd really like to try, but I keep saying I'm going to wait until the release is a lot more stable. It seems to be getting there, but I'll likely wait until December before moving forward with P:K.

Well, I'll have to wait a bit longer before
having Pathfinder Barbarian Iconic character
Amiri in my party. From the Kickstarter.

Then there's also a discount on ESO: Summerset, even though I'm likely not to reach there on my ESO main for quite a while.

Because you can't have an ESO expansion
without everyone's favorite Morag Tong
agent tagging along for the ride. From
playstation.com.

Or maybe I'll go purchase a game I'd purchased ages ago for a PC back in the Vista days, such as Total War: Medieval, that no longer plays on current machines because of graphics code changes.** Before you ask why I'd want to play the first version of The Creative Assembly's Medieval games, it's because Medieval 1 is a completely different design than Medieval 2. Medieval 2 follows every design after Total War: Rome and has armies roaming through the maps in fine detail --you can go across terrain and roads, for example-- while Medieval 1 is an area control game in the same way that Risk is. Sometimes you want to play one style, and sometimes you want to play the other.

Sometimes you just wanna slam down some
armies and say "Egypt is MY territory!"
From steam.com.

But you know, I realize that whatever I choose I'll have time for playing later, as we've got the Steam Winter Sale coming in about a month. And I'm fine with that.






*Well, except for the fact that they don't need distractions heading into the final weeks of the Fall semester.

**When that first arose when I'd replaced the graphics card on my old Athlon system, both NVidia and The Creative Assembly pointed fingers at each other, but it turned out that it was NVidia at fault, as they chose not to support an older graphics ruleset. The net effect was that I was no longer able to play the first Medieval: Total War (before they changed the name around) until the Steam version appeared.

The End Comes for Nirn

I finished the endgame for the original portion of The Elder Scrolls Online yesterday. While the final battle at the endgame --and afterwards, your personal story-- took about 8-10 hours of playing time* for a player experiencing it for the first time, the overall storyline for ESO from your initial starting zone through to the end was much faster than I expected. By comparison, my original toon on SWTOR** took probably about 4 months of steady play, and WoW.... Well, lets just say that WoW took considerably longer to get to L60.

But I now know the reason why the opening up of the other faction's zones was so critical to ESO's future: the original game was too short compared to other MMOs.

Believe me, I'm not a "I'm bored, there's nothing to do!!" person, because MMOs by their nature have a lot of side items such as crafting and whatnot, but when I finished the original game I thought, "Huh. That really was too short!"

The story did have a taste of Mary Sue-ness to it at the end, especially given that your character pretty much came out of nowhere to do some amazing things at the end. However, to Zenimax's credit they weren't afraid to let some NPCs die in that final assault. Oh, it wasn't George RR Martin level of bloodbath, but a couple of NPCs that I really kind of liked didn't make it at the end.***

ESO did use a heavy amount of what I'd call personal phasing --where the story provides phasing while in plain sight of other toons, who obviously can't see what you're seeing-- to make the final assault more interesting. This is a grade up from what WoW implemented in Wrath through Mists, and it really takes some virtual sleight of hand to pull this off. Kudos to the dev team for doing just that.

Choice did have a bit of an impact on who shows up in the final assault. If you chose one group over another in the Coldharbour zone, that group was the one that showed up. (Sorry, I'm not giving spoilers away.) That happened numerous times in Coldharbour, and in at least one case making the "right" choice meant a critical quest sequence went a lot more smoothly. But whether it was the right ethical/moral answer, that's a different story.

The one thing that I found most interesting, however, was the impact that the so-called "good" Daedra have on Nirn. I'm pretty much used to Molag Bal, Sheogorath, and company having an impact, but the good Daedra have a pretty large impact as well. I kept wondering just where the Aedra are, and why they're not very active. In that respect, I felt that the world of The Elder Scrolls was more akin to a Swords and Sorcery setting --such as Age of Conan-- where the gods really don't seem to give much of a crap about the Conan's world, but the demons and demon gods certainly do.

Is it worth it to play? Yes, it is, if for nothing else than the voice acting alone. I was geeking out when I heard both Kevin Michael Richardson (Sai Sahan) and Jennifer Hale (Lyris Titanborn) as companions in the same way that their characters in SWTOR were (Jace Malcom and Satele Shan, respectively).

The two in the middle....
(From elderscrolls.wikia.com)

...are the same as these two.
(From wattpad.com.)

The one thing I'm not exactly sure of is just how active the game really is. It certainly seemed active, but there's apparently only one Megaserver for North America, so I don't know how active it truly is. Besides, I'm not playing in Summerset, which is the current expac, so there's that as well.

Anyway, I'm seriously glad that Zenimax opened up the other alliance zones, because otherwise I'd find myself in an uncomfortable situation of saying "this was way too short for me".





*That also included a few extra side quests in the final battle zones --in the same zone as the vampires-- which didn't take terribly long. Maybe it was an hour combined for those side quests, as the delve was fairly straightforward, but I tend to lose track of time when doing some of these side quests.

**This was 2012ish, and that meant all the original side quests were firmly in place and pretty much a requirement if you wanted to gear up your companions.

***And in true MMO fashion, the moment you walk out of the last phased story zone, there were all the NPCs back doing what they were doing.