Mass Effect vs SWTOR: A Short Comparison

Okay, this is very short, because I'm only about a couple of hours into Mass Effect itself.

Yes, yes, I bought the Mass Effect Trilogy. I bought it to help fill out an Amazon order to get it into the "free shipping" price area, and besides it was much cheaper than buying it from Origin.*

There were some adventures getting the original Mass Effect to work properly --mainly involving shutting down Origin when ME loads**-- but when it loaded...

Mass Effect is the natural progression of Bioware cinematic storytelling from Baldur's Gate I and II through Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic I and II, and Jade Empire. That cinematic storytelling process is actually quite revealing to me, who played BG 1 and 2 in the late 90s/early 00s and then skipped ahead to SWTOR long before going back to Jade Empire and now Mass Effect. In a way, Bioware's original Mass Effect story mirrors the intro stories of SWTOR to a significant degree.

Part 1: Starting Zone

It goes without saying that MMOs have a starting zone where the player first learns the basics before setting off into the big bad world. Even useful learning experiences like "don't stand in the bad" will make an appearance in the Starting Zone and it's adjacent low level zones. But as for the story in a Starting Zone, that's been fleshed out over time.

The evolution of the MMO starting zone from generic knockabout place to one with a specific storyline can be most easily seen in WoW. The Vanilla races, particularly in the pre-Cataclysm questlines, were very much a hodge-podge of "do this", "fetch that", "kill ten rats"***. The BC races had a bit of a questline but still harkened back to that earlier Vanilla era. It was only in the post-Cataclysm races that you found an actual story --using phasing-- that dominated the starting zone experience.

Age of Conan, with its Tortage starting zone, probably is the best of the classic old style MMOs for a story driven starting area. It's a shame, really, that the story driven promise of Tortage wasn't followed up in the regular zones to the same degree.

LOTRO, of course, does have its own story driven zones that propel the player into the next, regular low level areas, but the story line can get lost in the "kill ten rats" quests that dominate the game. It's only when you hit the old "max level" quests does the LOTRO Shadows of Angmar story really shine.

But SWTOR is a different animal entirely. Designed to be strictly a story driven MMO from the start, each of the eight class stories deals with the same general process:

• Player is given an initial couple of quests
• Player deals with a sudden shakeup of the current order, and has to spend the bulk of the starting zone making sense of the shakeup
• Player is handed a sudden story twist that turns the entire conflict on its head and propels the story to the faction's capital planet.

This by itself isn't too remarkable, since LOTRO's, AoC's, and WoW's Cataclysm races have similar trajectories. However, the other three's lack of fully acted cutscenes lack the same emotional punch that SWTOR's has.****

Which leads me neatly into Mass Effect, which has cutscenes that heighten the dramatic impact when the unexpected twist happens. You could also argue that there were two unexpected twists for the intro zone for Mass Effect, the *mumblety mumble* one and the one at the very end of the mission, and I'd not disagree with you.

Hell-lo, bad boy.
From multiple places on the web.

Part 2: Capital City and Intrigue

It kind of goes without saying that in MMOs a standard exit from the starting zone is the pilgrimage to the faction/race's Capital City/Planet. You leave Shadowglen and end up at Teldrassil. Your Cimmerian leaves Tortage and ends up at Conarch Village.***** Your Sith leaves Korriban and ends up at Dromund Kaas.

And so it goes with Mass Effect that you end up at The Citadel.

For a space based SF game, Mass Effect and SWTOR are eerily alike: you arrive without a means of interstellar travel as a passenger on a ship, and you have to navigate the consequences of the story twist on the starter world. You're introduced to galactic politics, various races, and no small amount of intrigue along the way. An older game such as Mass Effect compresses the experience a bit compared to the more fully realized MMO environment, but it still provides an eerily similar experience to the SWTOR capital cities. Mass Effect's angle is a bit different than most of the SWTOR class stories as the politics is more direct and at the highest levels of (what passes for) government, but all revolve around the same basic theme of dealing with the fallout from the starting world.

Part 3: A Ship and the Means to Go Where We Will

I thought Joachim's line from The Wrath of Khan highly appropriate for this last part.

The SWTOR player has conquered the immediate threat on the Capital world, and as a result more issues appear on other worlds. Time to give that player a starship!

(Or, in the case of the Smuggler, 'I have GOT MY DAMN SHIP BACK! and I now want to go and... What's this? Treasure you say?')

From swtor.wikia.com.

And Mass Effect follows the same pattern. (Sorry kids, no spoilers here.)

From masseffect.wikia.com.

The Normandy has some really nice lines and a great look, but my fondness still goes with the Smuggler's starship.

The Normandy and a SWTOR starship are outwardly dissimilar, but inside you can talk to your crew and advance crew questlines. Since Mass Effect is rated M, that presumably means a romance that enters into R rated territory, unlike SWTOR's romances. However, since the crew in SWTOR is somewhat limited in scope (at least initially), the Normandy not only looks bigger it feels bigger.


Part 4: No More Hurry Up and Wait

On the flip side, the missions for Mass Effect are akin to taking an entire SWTOR planet story and compressing it a bit. That has the effect of heightening the tension while at the same time making you feel like you just might be missing something somewhere. MMO zone/planet stories have enough time spread out between them that you have a bit more leisure time to take care of any side quests without rushing things too much.

I suppose you could say that Mass Effect --and other Bioware console/PC games-- have had an impact on SWTOR in Knights of the Fallen Empire by eliminating a lot of the side quests and enabling the player to focus strictly on the main questline with few interruptions.


Conclusions: What, you were expecting spoilers?

I've obviously not gotten very far in Mass Effect 1. Among other things, I'm playing ME1 at the same time as LOTRO and keeping myself afloat in SWTOR and some other MMOs, and I'm resisting the impulse to play until 4 AM.****** But the more I play ME1, the more I think that the experience with the Mass Effect series in particular has influenced Bioware's design for SWTOR.  There's been more than once when I've exclaimed "Hey, that feels like SWTOR!" while playing the game.

Which isn't a bad thing in my book.





*Or buying a used XBox 360 and the games that way.

**There's actually a setting box for this in the game's settings menu in Origin --not the Settings menu IN GAME, but the one in Origin itself. If you deselect the option for keeping Origin running while ME plays, you're able to play the game properly. Took me about 45 minutes of tweaking and Googling to figure that one out.

***Often literally so.

****Like, oh, the cutscene for the Trooper's or the Knight's sudden twist.

*****Yes, I know, Cimmerians don't have a capital city because they are nomadic tribes, but as an in-game necessity the Cimmerians use the home village of Conan's tribe as the "capital".

******Although this election season has made me want to lose myself in a game --or drink a lot-- for obvious reasons.

Some Wednesday Humor

While there's already a classic College Humor skit out there for how female armor sucks, this dropped over the summer from Viva La Dirt League (on their YouTube channel):

Yep, it's kind of like that.

Silenced

For those in the know --and those not impacted by the DDoS attack on DNS servers yesterday-- Friday was the beginning of a strike by the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists against eleven prominent video game companies.

Here's the list of companies, courtesy of the SAG-AFTRA pdf:

• Activision Publishing Inc.
• Blindlight, LLC
• Corps of Discovery Films
• Disney Character Voices, Inc.
• Electronic Arts Productions, Inc.
• Formosa Interactive, LLC
• Insomniac Games, Inc.
• Interactive Associates, Inc.
• Take 2 Interactive Software
• VoiceWorks Productions, Inc. and
• WB Games, Inc.

If you notice, several major MMO properties are hit by this, such as WoW (Activision), SWTOR (EA), and LOTRO (WB Games).

I do have to wonder what sort of impact this strike will have on future games in the pipeline. I don't think that games that are already in the can but haven't been released are going to be affected, such as the latest SWTOR expac or Mass Effect Andromeda, but anything still being developed is likely to be impacted.

The interview with Jennifer Hale (yes, the Mass Effect and SWTOR Trooper Jennifer Hale) on NPR linked to above is very interesting.

Switching Things Around

Nintendo became the first of the big three console makers to drop a trailer for their next gen console, the Nintendo Switch.

Unlike Sony and Microsoft with their upcoming releases, the Switch is actually a replacement console for the Wii U, and it goes in the direction that Sony attempted to move with their Vita 2, but amped up to 11.

Here's the trailer that Nintendo dropped this morning:

Yes, you saw that right. They were playing Skyrim with the game.

With the presence of Splatoon on the Switch, it seems that the Wii U will still likely connect to the Nintendo network platform.

Additionally, given Nintendo's typical modus operandi of supporting the previous console's games on the current console, Wii U games will likely be playable on the Switch.

Nintendo also claims to have 50 developer houses on board for game creation for the Switch, but the real question is whether they will hang in there or bug out after a year or so like developers did with the Wii U.

One other item of note is that the system runs on a custom Nvidia Tegra processor, the same processor family found in Nvidia Shield tablet. Perhaps that is why the Switch looks like it can do so much given its mobile emphasis.

Still, it looks like Nintendo is blurring the lines between mobile and traditional console gaming in a way that wasn't possible before.


EtA: Added the links to some of the items.

You know you've become immune to video game bugs when...

...you almost fail a quest because you think that the "slurred" words are merely bugged, poorly translated ones.

That happened on LOTRO for me, with the Lothlorien quest (just north of the vinyards) to admonish the Elven revelers who have... imbibed... way too much.* I read the exclamations above the revelers, and at first thought that those who actually said something were the ones who need to be admonished.

One try disabused me of that idea.

Then the next try I noticed the slurred or mispronounced words. Surely, I thought, they could have gotten a better QA person to fix this.

Then....

OH! THOSE are the people I need to admonish!

Excuse me while I go and imbibe a little, myself...





*Seriously, with three weeks to go before the 2016 US Presidential Election, I think I'll be doing the imbibing along with the NPCs.

Not Everyday an MMO Trailer Blows Up

Well, I should clarify that and say "an MMO trailer NOT from Blizzard blows up the internet".

Bioware must be doing something right, as the 6 minute trailer from Bioware for the upcoming expac for SWTOR started trending on FB today. The funny thing is, people are pointing at the trailer as being better than several of the Star Wars movies.

Seriously, go Google it and you'll see.

Oh, and here's the trailer if you haven't seen it yet:

Yeah, Right...

Courtesy of Facebook.

Pretty sure people know my opinion on this one.

A Few Short Musings

• If I ran as much as my LOTRO toon does, I'd be back to a normal weight.
  
  I'm at that point in the Mines of Moria storyline where I'm sent from the Crossroads down to the Waterworks, then back to the 21st Hall, then down to the Flaming Deeps, and then back to the 21st Hall, then down to the Waterworks.... You get the idea. Outside of the fact that the storyline wouldn't simply wait for me to go back and forth like that* if this were closer to a real time event, I'd have worked off all those years of helping to "eliminate" excess Halloween candy in our household.
  
• Even though I love the "slurring" that WoW has their toons perform when talking, I think I prefer the LOTRO version of the "drunk toon". Sure, both MMOs have the screens get progressively blurrier, but LOTRO takes it a step further by making everything monochromatic sepia toned, like you're swimming in an oil tainted pool. The toneless muttering also makes it sound like I've collapsed in a corner, arguing with myself over whether Stalin would have arisen in Russia if Lenin hadn't passed away when he did.
  
• It felt weird logging into SWTOR after having spent so much time in LOTRO recently. I'd jumped on a toon that was deep in Justicar territory on Coruscant, and it felt.... Airy. I never thought I'd say that about the lower levels of Coruscant, but after a month's worth of slogging through the Mines of Moria, it sure feels open. And welcoming.

*I once read it described as an offshoot of moving at the speed of plot. In a novel or a pencil and paper RPG, these boring parts can be skipped to keep the pace going. Videogames, not so much. You'd have to rely upon cutscenes to keep things moving, or automated transportation perhaps, but neither is an ideal situation.

Gimli cast his hood over his face.

The Company stood silent beside the tomb of Balin. Frodo thought of Bilbo and his long friendship with the dwarf, and of Balin's visit to the Shire long ago. In that dusty chamber in the mountains it seemed a thousand years ago and on the other side of the world.

At length they stirred and looked up, and began to search for anything that would give them tidings of Balin's fate ...

'I fear the book had ill tidings to record ...' said Gandalf. 'The first clear word is sorrow, but the rest of the line is lost, unless it ends in estre. Yes, it must be yestre followed by day being the tenth of novembre Balin lord of Moria fell in Dimrill Dale. He went alone to look in Mirror mere. an orc shot him from behind a stone. we slew the orc, but many more ... up from east up the Silverlode. ... Poor Balin! He seems to have kept the title that he took for less than five years.'
--from The Fellowship of the Ring


I'm a bit of a night owl. This admission is no surprise to people who know me, but it also means that I'm used to the night sky and darkness in general. There were days at a previous job when I'd go to work early (3 AM local time) and leave at 7 PM, and in the winter I'd never see the sun in the sky.*

But after a few weeks of Moria, I've started craving the sun.

Although I may play one on LOTRO, I'm no elf. I don't mind urban environments, and as a kid I wanted to be an astrophysicist**, so I was fine with staying up all night working on telescopes. Khazad-dum, however, is a completely different animal.

Sure, there are places where there are wide open caverns that give the impression of space, but you're still enclosed under a mountain of rock.***

At least somebody has a sense of humor in this Valar forsaken place.

There's plenty to enjoy about the Mines of Moria, however, I can't shake the sense of impending doom. Sure, I know what happened to Durin's Bane courtesy of The Fellowship of the Ring, but that doesn't mean that the devs don't have more tricks up their sleeves. After all, the last third of Shadows of Angmar was a case study in an increasingly futile attempt to stop Angmar's inevitable victory in the North.

Having just completed the Waterworks (minus the raid part), all I can think of is that Balin and Company certainly weren't unprepared, and Balin himself was a shrewd and wise Dwarf. Was he simply blind to the reality of Durin's Bane, or did he think he'd marshaled enough forces to overcome what the entire Dwarf city of Khazad-dum could not? Of course, the expedition in the Expac is fortuitous in that a major obstacle (the Balrog) is removed, but the Balrog itself didn't destroy Balin's expedition; it was everyone else who'd moved into the Mines since the Dwarves fled who did it in.

(One of these days I should just go look up Stephen Colbert and shoot the breeze with him about whether he thought that Moria was reclaimed in the Fourth Age.)





*I would get in early so I could actually, you know, get work done. the 4-5 hours of (almost) nobody around meant that nobody would stop by and talk to me about stuff, so it meant I could focus on my large pile of work to do.

**I figured that since I was nearsighted --and consequently unable to sign up to be a fighter pilot-- going the science route would be the best way to qualify for the astronaut corps. There's one family story about when my grandmother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said "An Astrophysicist!" A puzzled look crept across her face, and she turned to my mom. In a loud whisper, she asked "What IS that?" "I don't know!" my mom whispered back.

***I've visited a couple of artificial caverns created by mining limestone (and Detroit has underground salt mines that I've not visited but are similar in scope), and the spaces created are similar but on a smaller scale. The closest I can describe it is the 21st Hall in terms of columns preventing the ceiling from collapsing, as I doubt Tolkien had the mining knowledge to understand how to tie the ceiling into the bedrock above and prevent the ceiling from collapsing. Tolkien could understand columns, however.

Well, That's That

I was going to post about something else, but it seems that Blizzard is continuing its dominance of my posting cycle.

This time, it's a bit unexpected: Chris Metzen is retiring from Blizzard.

He's not leaving for another company, unlike some of the others in the industry, but actually jumping off of the train to spend time with his family.

While I didn't agree with every decision Blizz' WoW dev team made, I can respect his work. Best of luck, Chris.

Don't Click on the Random Item...

...just sayin'.

Why, you may ask?

If SWTOR's tendency to hide World Bosses behind clickable items won't deter you*, maybe this will:

Seriously, if you find a hidden puzzle without any explanation, don't start acting like the dwarves in Khazad-dum and delve too greedily and too deep. You just might unleash an Old God upon Azeroth.





*And really, I've done that several times on SWTOR before I finally got the hint and didn't click. Like, say, on Voss. "Oh look, a mysterious tablet. OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT!!!!!!!"

Now this is a bit more like it

With Legion's release imminent, this arrived in my INBOX:

Now this is what I kind of expected from Blizz. No mention of my previous mains, however.

Best of luck to WoW players on release day!

Now This is an Odd Gear Check

Silly me.

And here I thought I was going to proceed with the story for LOTRO's Mines of Moria expansion without running into a grind.

But a few days later, and I'm slaying Orcs and Angmarim and Dunlendings in Eregion, grinding away at getting a legendary weapon up to L10. Apparently a legendary weapon demands sacrifice, bathing in the blood of my enemies. (Who knew?)

The first five levels weren't so bad.

The next two as well.

But by the time you reach L8, you have to whack a bunch of orcs just to move up a level, and I dread what it's going to be like when I get to, oh, much farther downstream, such as L20 or so.

I had no idea that I would end up wielding Stormbringer in LOTRO.

This was what the cover of the first Elric book
I owned looked like. From tor.com.

And maybe I ought to start getting concerned about LOTRO's endgame, given how the Elric Saga ended up.

(And no, I'm not going to spoil that one; the Moorcock books are very quick reads. But given that Michael Moorcock has rather publicly stated his dislike for Tolkien's works, I'm not sure what he'd think about my comparison.)

"I'm going on an adventure!!"

Somewhere, up there, lies the Black Pit.

Courtesy of a lot of diligent grinding --and a major boost from the LOTRO 50% off sale-- I managed to accumulate enough Turbine Points to nab the entire expansion for the Mines of Moria.

Some thanks goes to the oldest mini-Red, who has one toon on my account on this server, and did some grinding for deeds herself a while back.

But if you'll excuse me, there's a world underneath those mountains to explore.

Shaken, Not Stirred

I've always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem. --Benedict Cumberbatch

The 60's era spy genre, as interpreted by the SWTOR Agent class story, has all of the classics covered: danger, double crossing, sex/romance, an insidious enemy, and a dashing, heroic character at the center.

And no easy choices.

Although it was before my time by several

years, I'm familiar with this tune by Johnny Rivers.

I'm about at the end of Chapter 2, and I recognize all of the signs for a big reveal and/or turning point that sends me on to Chapter 3.* But the more I've thought about the class story that I've seen so far, I've been impressed with how clever Bioware has been to humanize the story and get you on the agent's side.

(Spoilers after the break)

What a Puzzlement

The name I'd chosen eons ago for the Blizzard forums is not Redbeard, believe it or not.

I was quite a bit more mundane and used one of my old standby forum names, because I was used to having Redbeard already taken.*

Imagine my surprise, then, when I received an e-mail from Blizzard.

A small portion of the e-mail.

Yes, ol' Redbeard is front and center in the e-mail.

I'm used to some of my toons showing up in the occasional Blizzard e-mail, such as Azshandra, Nevelanthala, and Tomakan, but this is.... different.

Just who reads this blog, anyway?





*There must be a ton of Scooby Doo fans out there. Unfortunately, I'm not going to link the episode that features the Ghost of Redbeard, "Go Away Ghost Ship", as I can see that the videos out there are pretty thinly veiled attempts to avoid copyright infringement (video is speeded up, and white dots and smudges are deliberately introduced to avoid bots.)

Methinks I need a new d20

Gen Con begins today in Indianapolis, and this year I'm going to be reduced to watching it from afar.

Due to school commitments (marching band camp) and monetary commitments (the Grand College Tour), we're going to take a pass this year.

But that doesn't mean that I won't keep up with what's going on, as boardgamegeek.com has their BoardGameGeekTV up and running over at Gen Con.

And I've  a connection on the inside, as my brother-in-law has been attending for years and is likely in line right now (~6 AM Indianapolis time).

Go forth and play games!

Hey, at least I didn't die of dysentery

I haz returned.

The Great College Tour is complete. Universities and colleges were visited, food was consumed, and nary a video game was played.

Hell, I didn't even THINK of MMOs or video games until our last visit of the Tour. The guide for the last university tour paused in front of a room at the Student Center and asked if anyone here played video games.

Three mini-Reds' hands shot up, along with those of a couple of other people.

Well, the guide said, this is the video game room. There are consoles and oversized screens there for people to play, and it's all free of charge.

I swear I thought I saw the mini-Reds' levitate.

***

Not all was serious business, certainly. We did sample the local cuisine (which, in Chicago, means Chicago style hot dogs and Chicago style pan pizza), and we took a day off and visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Here, have a picture of the Pioneer Zephyr --the first US streamliner-- which was donated to the Museum of Science and Industry in 1960:

Clean Up in Aisle Four

After several years, I've finally pushed past the last Kerrals Jarvis quest in the Agent's storyline on Hutta and begun my last unfinished class story in earnest.

Even after creating another new Agent and reaching that same moral roadblock, I finally decided to bite the bullet and finish that quest. Still, that wasn't an easy thing to do.

(Spoilers after the break for the SWTOR storylines.....)

Have a Nice Trip

I spent most of the past week visiting different colleges and universities with the Redbeard clan, and while that also meant not a whole lot of gaming, I also got a lot of exercise walking around several campuses.

Sort of.

You see, I'd busted my foot back in early June the day of a college visit to Bowling Green State University. I was walking across our hotel's open area, where their attempt to invoke the images of New Orleans' French Quarter included masks such as these:

The photo doesn't do it justice.
The thing is close to 2 meters tall.

As I was staring at these masks that my wife compared to American Horror Story's Freak Show, I tripped over my feet and I felt intense pain in the heel of my foot. To my later regret, I convinced myself that I'd be fine and went on the visit anyway, which included a 90 minute walking tour of the campus.

I discovered just how much of a mistake that was when we left for home after the visit and stopped for lunch along the way. I simply could not put any weight on my foot without pain shooting through my heel.

After a week, I decided to visit the doctor's office since the pain wasn't going away much at all in spite of rest, ice, and elevation. The doctor took an x-ray and discovered that my foot was not in fact broken, but merely sprained. More rest and ice was the prescription.

Fast forward to a month and a half later, I can walk fairly well, but the foot is around 85-90%.

But it still isn't fun walking around college campuses, particularly those with lots of hills.

***

Anyway, after one of the campus tours we stopped for lunch at a hole-in-the-wall Latin restaurant. We placed our order, and while we were waiting, I noticed a couple of construction workers eating nearby. Normally, that's not a surprise, but what attracted my eye was the "Blizzard" logo on the back of one of the workers' shirt.

Sure enough, when he went to get a drink, he had a giant Horde symbol on the front.

"For the Horde," I whispered. And smiled.

Anyone for a friendly game of pick-up?

MMO players tend to be a bit of an odd breed.

No, I don't mean in the "u suck noob!" manner, and not in the "obsess over a game" manner either.

But in how a significant portion of the player base is constantly looking at new, unreleased material and that this is considered completely normal.

Imagine about 10-20% of the people who saw The Force Awakens got to see it about 2 months beforehand, multiple times, and a) got to provide detailed write-ups of the entire plot and the fights before the movie was even released, and b) used the viewings to organize friends into the optimal movie watching strategy for the Midnight showing. And consider that the really hardcore viewers were in a race to see who could finish watching the movie first, and you've got a bit of what it's like operating with the PTR servers for an MMO.

It may sound silly when converting the MMO concept of a PTR server into other forms of entertainment, but to a decent sized portion of the player base a PTR server is absolutely vital to playing an MMO. Working out boss strategies, figuring out optimal pathways to world firsts, exploring every corner of a new expac (major or minor) and writing up a world guide, and figuring out what the newest "hot" PvP class will be are all integral to the MMO experience.

For MMO developers, the PTR provides free player feedback and bug reports, so it is a win-win for them as they can tweak the patches prior to formal release. As an IT person myself, I completely get that; it's the equivalent of a QA server where people can kick the tires prior to a formal release to Production. And I like that, as it means that I have a better chance at a bug-free release.

But this also highlights what MMOs are to a certain amount of the player base: an exercise in (group) mechanics and achievements, where the theme is secondary (or tertiary, if you count the toon sex appeal on some games*).

***

I'm guilty as the next person for trying to do things such as figuring out a rotation or going to Elitist Jerks and try to min/max my toons' gear, but I have to wonder whether the MMO community has lost something over the years.

Go ahead and Google "legion is coming are you ready", and scan the results. I see forum and blog and YouTube posts from as far back as August and September 2015 on how to maximize your output and prep your stable of toons to be ready for when Legion drops. Remember, these are posts from almost a year ago about what, mechanically speaking, you need to do to prepare yourself for the new WoW expac that hasn't dropped yet.

To me, as a long time boardgame player, these articles remind me of discussions surrounding the hard core Eurogames, such as Puerto Rico or Tigris and Euphrates. If you hang around BoardGameGeek enough, you'll find that there's an "optimal" strategy for Puerto Rico, and if you play with some of the hard core, you'll be berated if you deviate from that strategy; yes, the exact same "L2P NOOB!!!" behavior exists in the board game community. And, like the MMOs, the theme is less important than the mechanics and the team requirements to win the game (or finish the raid). Eurogames in particular were infamous for a tacked-on theme hiding behind an optimization game, and if you were out shopping for boardgames it made a lot of sense to read the entire description on the back very carefully so you'd know whether the game is the sort that you'd be interested in or not. What might be a game that sounds like wheeling and dealing in Istanbul's grand bazaar is really an economic simulation that requires you to figure out how many wheelbarrows you need to transport goods to market to exchange for rubies. The theme itself is secondary to the mechanics behind the theme.

Comparing a Eurogame to an MMO isn't really fair, since MMOs are much bigger than any Euro, and because they are bigger, they can appeal to far more than simply the min-maxers and the others. But at the same time, those subgroups do take up a lot of the oxygen in the room.

***

I used to gripe at Blizzard for shoving a lot of plot and background development off screen and into their books. "The game is right there," I'd say, "why not incorporate all of this into the game instead?"

My belief was that Blizz had decided that it was cheaper to pay an author to write a tie-in novel rather than develop the story in WoW itself, and I'm sure that's still part of the equation. But what if Blizzard did this because it wanted to get some of the story out of the game? Maybe Blizzard recognized that enough players weren't interested in the story, so to preserve the story as much as possible yet still accommodate those players that weren't interested, they decided to push the story into novels. The critical path storyline is still present in the game, but all of the background material that a decent portion of the player base wouldn't be interested in was moved offline, as it were.

If this is the case, then Blizz is performing one more balancing act that I'd not have considered beyond the traditional PvE vs. PvP and the class balancing ones: how much story to incorporate in game and how much reveal before release.

***

I've picked on WoW a bit in this meandering post because Legion is due out soon, but this argument that MMO players are focusing so much on mechanics --to the extent that they spend time in playing the game in PTR to be ready for when the game is actually released-- could be applied to just about any other MMO out there.*** It just seems somewhat unreal when you think about it, that a player willingly sacrifices their sense of wonder at seeing something new just so that they've got their practice in when the big day comes.

In that respect, maybe MMOs are a bit like sports after all. There are those who play for purely social reasons, and those who make a commitment to dedication to work hard and do well. And then there are the pros (and the wannabee pros) who practice so that nothing is ever left to chance.

As for me, I realize that I'm never going to be hardcore, and I know that my physical skills aren't as good as they were even 5-6 years ago, so I'm not worried about being the best I can be. Competence is enough. And I know enough now to realize that while I've got elements of a completionist and a perfectionist in me, it's about the journey rather than the destination.

That's not going to keep me from griping at rules changes, and nothing screams "stay off my lawn!" more than grousing about how things were back in the day.





*gamebynight.com pretty much covered my opinion of TERA, particularly Item #4.

**I'm sure Blizz could generate statistics based on how quickly players click through quest text.

***Or MOBA.


EtA: Corrected a grammatical issue. Or two.

Whatever you do, DON'T piss off a Sith

In honor of the Dark vs. Light event going on in SWTOR, I thought I'd post a link to a Taylor Davis video.

If you may recall, Taylor is the violinist who has been making videos of her arrangements of music from all corners of geekdom. People who have read PC before may recall my post referencing her rendition of Theme for Rohan by Chance Thomas for the LOTRO expansion Riders of Rohan. Well, she's outdone herself in this video, uploaded just prior to the release of The Force Awakens last December.

And yes, that's her as both Jedi and Sith.

I could have done without the synthesized backing music, but that's because I hear that and get flashbacks to the Star Wars Theme by MECO.

For the curious, here's the YouTube video of the behind the scenes making of her Star Wars Medley:

1200 down, only 1200 to go

It's kind of ironic to me that a game that has so many expansions --LOTRO-- has slowed to a grindy crawl for me.

I've finished Shadows of Angmar, and I've got the epic questline for the Mines of Moria, but I don't have the expansion purchased. And, I'm determined to handle this with Turbine Points, which means I have to grind deeds.

Lots and lots of deeds.

as the title of this post makes plain, I've got a loooong way to go before I can purchase the expac. And even then, I'll likely need to wait for a sale in the LOTRO Store for me to actually get enough Turbine Points to buy the thing.

Will it be worth it?

Everything I've read online has said that the Mines of Moria is fantastic, but that only goes so far with motivation when you're killing another 100 orcs.*

***

With LOTRO becoming a slog, I've returned to SWTOR for the time being.

In an amusing bit of topsy-turvy, just as I got heavily invested in the Shadows of Angmar ending, the mini-Reds went back to SWTOR and started playing that heavily.

Having created somewhere along the lines of about 16 toons across several servers, I know the SWTOR zones fairly well by now, and so I was amused by hearing them talk during lunch about what they're doing with the characters they've created. And the comparisons between World Chat on LOTRO and Zone Chat on SWTOR.

From my perspective, World Chat on LOTRO has declined a bit of late, with a few people on Gladden spamming WC with stuff for sale (at a grossly excessive price) and people following along behind them telling them to move it to Trade Chat. And then there's the Trump fans --and those who think Trump isn't going far enough-- and let's just say that I've not been enjoying LOTRO's World Chat much lately.

However, SWTOR's Zone Chats aren't exactly better, either. And to be honest, I'd really really hate to see what Trade Chat on WoW is like right now.

Seems that the coarsening of public debate has hit the MMO genre in a huge way this Summer. Not that things were great before this Summer, but I feel there has been a distinct drop-off in quality and behavior since both the 2016 US Presidential Election and the Brexit referendum kicked into high gear.

And if it's bad in MMO space, I hate to think of what it's like in Xbox Live, Playstation Plus, or in chat for MOBAs right now.

***

At times like this, I wouldn't blame people one bit for turning off World/Zone/Trade Chat and focusing almost completely on Guild Chat.

If you're surrounded by a bubble of friends, it can make all the difference between enjoying yourself and throwing your hands up in disgust. Sure, it's a bit of an echo chamber, but there are times when you want to seal yourself off from the rest of the nuthouse and just enjoy yourself.

Me, I go take a walk for some peace and quiet.**

Or maybe I should just go kill another 100 orcs or so.





*Per region. Or whatever the numbers are, but they're pretty high.

**Well, kind of. I busted my foot pretty badly a few weeks ago, and I proceeded to hobble along on a walking tour of a university an hour later. (Which was a big mistake.) The docs confirmed the foot isn't broken, but I was limping around in a boot for a few weeks.

As Memes Go.....

I'm not exactly a great fan of memes.

The ones you find floating around Facebook and other social media outlets often tend to reduce a complex topic down to a few partially correct zingers. Or they misassign quotes* while passing them off as correct.

That said, there is a place for memes of the sort that are making the blogging rounds again, such as the Creative Blogger Award. They provide a means of peeling back the facade and revealing a bit about the blogger behind the site without forcing the blogger to shout "Look at MEEEEE!" any more than they have to.**

Before you smirk and say "what are blogs for, anyway, if not for expressing your narcissism?", consider that most of the bloggers I know aren't the classic extrovert personalities. They do all love something, whether it is gaming, writing, or something else, and they use blogging to share their love with the world in a (relatively) passive way.

Pewdiepie, we're not.

As much as I groaned about it when I received the Creative Blogger Award nomination from Ravanel Griffon of Ravalation last week, I didn't mind quite as much as I let on. It's not a series of Truth or Dare questions, or even Twenty Questions, but rather 5 facts about yourself.

That, I can do.

***

In no particular order, here are five facts about me that I'm pretty sure nobody in the blogosphere knows:

• I once had a letter to Radio Austria International read on the air.
  
  I believe I may have mentioned once or twice that I do listen to shortwave radio, but my habits today aren't what they were back in the 90's and the 00's. Before the Web, I would get my international news from shortwave heavyweights such as the BBC World Service, Radio Deutche Welle, and Radio Nederland. Among the smaller players that beamed to North America, such as Radio Japan or Swiss Radio International, was Radio Austria International (or Radio Österreich International, ORF for short). Due to my work schedule, ORF's English Service was often the last program I'd listen to before bedtime, and they managed to pack in the news from Vienna as well as the program Report from Austria. One day, after listening to the news, I decided to send ORF a reception report as well as a comment on a story in the news --something I rarely did-- and a few weeks later I received a letter saying my letter was going to be read on the air. Sure enough, at the date specified, my letter was read on the air with a short comment from the presenter.





The letter suffered from water damage dating from
the move into our current house, but here it is after some cleaning up.






Sadly, Radio Austria International is now defunct, a victim of budget cuts and the changing methods of broadcasting news for nations worldwide.



• I once had to type three lab reports in one night.
  
  This might not sound so bad until you realize that each lab report was 20 - 30 pages long. And that the only reason why I did it was because my save disk became corrupted, ruining my copies of my reports.
  
  I'm dating myself here, but I'd been using old word processor program WordStar to work on my lab reports, and saving the data on 5.25" floppy disks. (Kids, if don't know what 5.25" floppy disks are, Google it.) Anyway, I was working on cleaning up the reports before a presentation at my lab final exam when I tried saving, and I heard the familiar ka-chung of the floppy drive's gears screwing up. Sure enough, my data was corrupted.
  
  In a panic, I realized I had about seven hours to rewrite about 80 or so pages to turn in for a grade.
  
  To make a long story short, with a lot of effort, a lot of tea, and a lot of semi-insane muttering to myself, I finished the reports in time. And I even survived the presentation during the final, which I believe was due to my being so tired I really didn't care how I sounded, so I wasn't scared at all.
  
• I am scared to death of needles.
  
  This isn't that much of a surprise, I suppose, since a lot of people don't like shots, but my personal reason why I could never do heroin centers around two specific incidents.
  
  The first one was a shot I received when I was 13 and I'd broken my collarbone at school. The needle that the doctor used to give me a shot of morphine prior to setting the bone was so large --about 0.25" diameter-- that I could see the hole at the end of the needle clearly. That terrified me, but because I was in such pain and was shoved down onto the table, I couldn't move as the glorified Morgul blade slowly moved in and punctured my shoulder.

  

  I feel for you, Frodo.
  From lotro.wikia.com.

  
  The second incident happened when I was much older, and as part of a life insurance application a nurse was dispatched to my house to draw a blood sample. The process was supposed to be simple: draw some blood from a vein in my right arm. While the nurse prepped my arm, I looked away, gritted my teeth and waited for the needle. I felt the needle prick, and then a whole lot of extra, well, movement in my arm. "Does that hurt?" the nurse asked. I glanced over and saw her wiggling the needle in a wide arc while it was still puncturing my arm.
  
  "Uh....." I began, my brain not really registering what I was seeing.
  
  "Ah, dammit, I went right through your vein. I'm going to have to use the other arm." She yanked the needle out, put it away, and grabbed a new needle and my left arm.
  
  After she was finished, my wife said something to the effect of "If you weren't scared of needles before, you definitely are now!"
  
  Gee, thanks.



• I once owned a car that had a hole in the floor.
  
  Seriously.
  
  The car was a 70s era Plymouth that had more rust on the body than actual metal, and one day I realized the the place where I'd been putting my left foot while driving felt, well, breezy. I checked out the place after I parked, and sure enough there was a heel-sized hole in the floor, with rust flakes all around. All that kept my foot from plunging through the floor and striking the pavement was the carpeting.
  
  And for the record, I just kind of kept driving the car, but just made sure that I put my left foot someplace else.
  
• When I was a teen, my D&D collection was thrown out to save me from the fires of Hell.
  
  Yes, I'm a refugee of the Satanic Panic that gripped the U.S. back in the 80s. In those days, many parents blamed societal ills affecting their kids on heavy metal music and D&D. This belief was whipped up by the story of James Dallas Egbert III, who allegedly vanished into the steam tunnels underneath Michigan State University in 1979. The reality is more than a bit mundane, but the ordeal and others such as Patty Pulliam's Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons organization pushed D&D into that "SATAN IS COMING FOR YOUR KIDS!!!" mini-hysteria that gripped a lot of parents of that era.
  
  My parents were no exception.
  
  I trace my own problems with it to the time my family visited some in-laws of my aunts, who happened to be very much in the Pat Robertson fan club.*** Robertson was one of many televangelists who rode the Satanic Panic bandwagon, constantly warning about Satan's minions trying to get their claws on the American youth.
  
  While I was at the in-laws place, my brother and I were both separately brought before what I'd call a tribunal of my mom, the in-laws, and my aunt. And we were grilled over D&D for about 5 minutes. I don't recall anything particularly strange about it, but that afternoon it was declared in a family meeting that D&D was now forbidden as tools of the Devil, and the stuff was all collected and thrown out.
  
  

  

  Yes, this was from an actual Jack Chick comic called Dark
  Dungeons. And this was one of the milder forms of anti-D&D propaganda.
  From Geek and Sundry's How D&D Writers Fought the Satanic Panic of the 1980s

  
  No protests could sway them. Not even the obvious parallels with role playing games and acting helped, because my parents believed**** that acting, playing a role, is fine, but role playing is something else.
  
  Perhaps more than anything else, those years in the wilderness as far as RPGs are concerned shaped my viewpoint on what RPGs are and how they are played, as well as my views on how religion and power can be misused when people are afraid of something new.
  
  I had to wait until later --college-- before I really was able to embrace RPGs once more, and I've never looked back.

At this point, I'm supposed to nominate people for this award, but no fear to my reading list, I don't intend to do so. Many of them were nominated already, so there's no reason to re-nominate them. And besides, all good memes have to come to an end anyway.

*Or worse, simply make them up. John Oliver had a great piece on this.

**Admittedly, a running blog is one of the worst things for someone who is a) shy, b) an introvert or c) both to work on.

***If you don't know who Pat Robertson is, count yourself lucky. He's a televangelist who loves to appear during disasters --natural or man-made-- and claim that it is God's wrath that brought about the tragedy. If you Google "Pat Robertson nutty statements" you'll get an idea of what I mean.

****And they still believe it. They also think Harry Potter and the Rick Riordan books lure kids into Satanism, and I've chosen to ignore their disapproval when they see my kids reading Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. The irony is that my parents were the ones who got me into SF&F in the first place with television shows such as Lost in Space and Star Trek, and books such as Lord of the Rings and The Sword of Shannara.


EtA: Added a few links that I'd missed.

Ancient History Unearthed

For the past month, I've noticed something odd about page views here to PC: there's a lot of page views for really old posts.

The first time it started up, I figured that it was due to some search engines winding their way through the blog, but now I have to wonder who is reading some of these articles from 2010. It's not like they were any great masterpieces of writing --trust me, I cringe whenever I read them and realize that was my voice back then-- but I have to wonder what is causing the interest.

It still is likely bot related, so I won't lose too much sleep over it, but it still does make me wonder.

A Short Funny

Oh, this made me laugh. Considering this has been a long week at work, I needed that.

Don't it just figure?

All I know is that the FB site "Almost Nerdy" shared this. If someone knows who created it, please let me know so I can attribute that to them.

For the record, I did look for "Summoning Stone" as a website, but no dice. There's way too many references to the Hearthstone card "Summoning Stone" to make it a worthwhile search.


EtA: There's a Twitter Feed called SummoningStone, and that's likely where this came from.

For Orlando

From a vigil held in Bangkok, Thailand, for the victims of the Orlando shooting.
From courierpostonline.com Photographer: Dario Pignatelli, Getty Image

Friday Musings

Yeah, it's a gloomy kind of day today --both outside, where it's rainy, and inside at work-- so my mind has turned to more whimsical musings.

• Do Elves ever get seasonal allergies? When I see the Night Elf pic below, all I can think of is that in September and October, I'd be miserable.

From walldevil.com, based on a Blizzard artwork.

• Unlike their common counterparts in fiction, the dwarves in Terry Brooks' Shannara series are scared as hell of being underground. (It was mentioned heavily in the very first book about how the Dwarves had to deal with all sorts of things underground during the years that they "became" Dwarves that it left a scar on their collective psyche.) Why don't you see that sort of thing more often in Fantasy fiction?
• The Star Trek Next Generation Federation jumpsuit is one of those outfits that flatters most forms, so why did Cryptic Studios feel the need to sex up their loading screens and whatnot? There's absolutely no need, and I can tell you from having been to Star Trek conventions before that a well done ST:TNG jumpsuit does VERY well all by itself without having to unzip or sexy up anything. To quote George Takei: "Oh mmyyy....."

I'm not posting the pic from A New Dawn, as it likely shows
someone from the alternate ST "Imperial" universe. (From reddit.com)

• I realize that for the sake of continuity that Governor Saresh had to disappear from Taris' questlines on SWTOR, but I still miss her. Even though my Smuggler was unable to successfully flirt with her. (Hey, it fit that the Old Man would find an older woman like Saresh attractive.)
  

  

  Yeah yeah yeah. I've heard that one before, Saresh.
  From Reddit.com

  
  
• Yesterday I pulled out my old copy of The Tolkien Scrapbook (now called A Tolkien Treasury) and perused the articles inside. The article The Evolution of Tolkien Fandom by Philip Helms reminded me how I really really wanted to run my own fanzine back in the day, using mimeograph to put everything together. But I never a) had the money for a mimeograph machine, and b) never really had the oomph to start and keep running a fanzine all by myself.
  
  And now the Tolkien fanzines at least are either mostly gone or have evolved into real scholarly works, and I'm not that into the History of Middle Earth series. Blogging is about as much of a "fanzine" mentality as I can handle.

A copy of Orcrist #3, circa 1969/1970, published
by the University of Wisconsin Tolkien Society.
From tolkienguide.com

• I've been tossing around the idea of splurging on a used Xbox 360 so I (and the mini-Reds) could play the Mass Effect trilogy (among other titles) without having to buy multiple copies of the game for the PC. I'd consider a 360 over the current gen consoles because the multiple disk games (such as ME2 and 3) aren't quite ready for backwards compatibility with the XBone, and the PS4 is now going to release yet another version of the PS4, and I don't want to get on that treadmill. Besides, I'm more likely to find a used 360 (or even a PS3) at garage sales than the current gen consoles, anyway.

As if I don't have enough things to do.
From masseffect.bioware.com

• The Boss has the day off, and is over watching Muhammad Ali's funeral procession on television (thank you, Chromecast). And the news just broke a short time ago that another sports legend, Canada's Gordie Howe, passed away. The fact that it is raining outside is somehow appropriate.

EtA: Fixed some grammatical issues.

The Greatest Has Fallen

The year 2016 continues to be hell on icons.

Some people remember him as that D-Con Fogger pitchman.

Others remember him from Saturday cartoons.

Others remember him from the movie starring Will Smith, or the When We Were Kings documentary.

Others still remember him from his moment in the sun at the 1996 Olympics, his body shaking violently from Parkinson's, as he held aloft the Olypmic torch.

Some still remember him as Cassius Clay, the young man who won the Light Heavyweight Boxing gold medal in the 1960 Olympics.

But for those who saw him fight in the ring, he was always Muhammad Ali, The Greatest.

And if you didn't think he was The Greatest, he would tell you he was. And use poetry to back it up. Yeah, and his fists, too.

Ali knocking down Sonny Liston in 1965.
From The Guardian.

But Ali finally succumbed to a respiratory ailment overnight, and died at the age of 74. I'm certain that Parkinson's disease, that he battled for over thirty years, helped do him in.

***

Back when boxing was found on national television --without the need for pay per view-- Muhammad Ali conquered the media. As the undisputed Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Ali was more than just a celebrity. He had a quick and sharp mind, using it to recite his own poetry and to comment on all sorts of things. Oh, and to also get into the heads of his opponents.

He was past his prime when I was a kid, and my first memories of him were that of a poster child for staying on longer than he should have. Thankfully, time has erased those last years of his boxing career, focusing instead on his finest moments in the ring. And his humanitarian efforts.

Muhammad Ali was one of those larger than life personalities that you simply never forget.

Rest in peace, Ali.

Did Somebody Call for a Hammer?

In case you lived under a rock the past week --or didn't know anything about Activision Blizzard-- you'd know that Overwatch was released into the wild.

And now they've begun throwing the ban hammer around.

According to The Daily Dot, Blizzard has banned roughly 1500 accounts out of China as part of their attempt to stay ahead in the cheating arms race.

While others are applauding the swift action to keep people from cheating on the game, I'm skeptical whether they can keep up the pace with cheaters without devoting a lot of resources to constantly monitoring the situation.

Judging by my experiences with a certain MMO from Blizzard, I'm not exactly sure that they'll be able to keep up over the long haul. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I'd frequently report toons with racist/sexist names or people who behaved badly in the game. But as time went on, I began to realize that the reporting did little good: when a person with a overtly racist toon name is L76 and playing in a battleground, that means that either nobody reported them or that the admins didn't bother dealing with the issue. And with people who leveled in the days before the instant L90 (or whatever it is now), they couldn't avoid people even if they tried.* And for that person to be playing in BGs....

I am glad that Blizz is starting off strong, but they now have to commit to follow through for the long run. And judging by at least one of their other properties, I'm not so sure that commitment will be there.






*And if anyone knows about that, it's me. I'd play at odd hours, serverwise, and even if you leveled simply by node farming or killing monsters out in the field you will still run into other people from time to time.

Friday Funny

Okay, after kind of a rough week at work, here's a YouTube "Honest Trailer" that I've been laughing at. It's a couple of years old, corresponding with the release of Warlords, but it is still accurate.

This Is Not Good

I'd been channeling my inner Leia when I first saw the trailer for Warcraft: The Beginning.

"I have a bad feeling about this" was my mantra whenever it would pop up on my blogger list as well as my Facebook feed. I remember how I really really wanted the Dungeons and Dragons movie* to succeed, but all it really did was become a punchline on how stupid the game must be to create a movie this bad. The mini-Reds would laugh at the occasional D&D Movie snippet that they'd find on YouTube, from Jeremy Irons' dreadful overacting to the actual use of the D&D metaterm "low level" in a description of a Mage in the movie.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

But still, I knew that there was a possibility that the Warcraft movie might turn out pretty good. For me, the major issue was going to be not whether they could find decent acting or direction, but whether the movie was going to be written primarily for the fans or for the wider audience. The former would go no matter what, but the latter were needed for sequels to happen. And for that to work, you needed to perform your world building gradually, following the example of Peter Jackson with the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.**

The worst thing that could happen? That you'd be required to perform research in order to understand and enjoy Warcraft: The Beginning.

What I didn't expect was to have a reviewer compare Warcraft not so favorably to the John Travolta adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard's SF pulp story Battlefield Earth.

The reviews aren't looking so good at the moment, with Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer sitting at 33% positive critical reviews.

And that doesn't even include the bad review that Kotaku published.

The commentary that I've been reading isn't exactly helping matters. When you've got fans hollering about how people should have done their research or played the game in order to appreciate the movie, that's not a good thing. That's the equivalent of telling fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that they should have read all of the backstory in the comics before they went to go see Captain America: Civil War.

Gee, thanks, Comic Book Guy.
From quickmeme.com

Things might change once more reviews are released, but right now it's not looking good for the Warcraft franchise.

Will I see the film in the theater? Not likely, as I rarely go to see movies in the theater***, but that doesn't mean that I won't hope for a decent turnout. But at the same time, the movie has to earn the turnout by being a good film that is accessible to the general public, and I'm not sure that Warcraft: The Beginning has what it takes.





*It it was at all possible, there were two sequels to the D&D movie. One went straight to the (then) Sci-Fi Channel, called Curse of the Dragon God, and the other... Let's just say that the other one --The Book of Vile Darkness-- is so bad that while it is listed in IMDB as a "TV Movie" I never saw it released onto television at all. If it did, I'd say it escaped more than was released.

**Even then, there were plenty of people who couldn't follow the details in the movie, but still liked it for the spectacle. And that was for an Academy Award winning trilogy. The problem with The Hobbit? Peter didn't follow the world building pace that he did in LOTR. Sure, a lot of the stuff was found in the LOTR Appendices, but it wasn't necessary to expand The Hobbit into three full movies.

***I typically don't have that much time to block off for a matinee, and that kind of leads into the second reason: it costs too much. I'd rather buy or rent the movie for little more than the cost of a theater ticket than have to deal with the decline in movie theater going etiquette. Oh, I've got stories to tell about theater and concert experiences.....

A Short FYI

Google has gotten around to enabling https connections to PC and other Blogger sites.

Therefore, if you want a secure connection, you can use https://parallelcontext.blogspot.com instead of the traditional http connection.

Carry on, good people, and Happy Friday!!

Happy Hour at the Prancing Pony

But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.

He drew a deep breath."Well, I'm back," he said.
--The Return of the King, JRR Tolkien


Last week I finally finished the original Epic campaign in LOTRO, the Shadows of Angmar.

It's been a while, probably since the original time through the SWTOR Smuggler story, that I've been reduced to sitting and looking at the screen, saying, "Wow."

Yes, I'm a bit of a (lapsed) Tolkien geek, so it was only natural that I figured out who certain baddies were long before the game started bashing people over the head with obvious hints.*

I'd also quipped to the oldest mini-Red that while this was supposed to take place prior to the Fellowship leaving Rivendell, you can tell that this was designed for "MMO Middle-earth", as there'd be no way a player could get back and forth from Ered Luin to Rivendell to Angmar to Forochel in anything resembling a "short" 2-3 month time span.

But that's fine. You can't expect a game to maintain it's dramatic tension by adhering religiously to the full scope of Tolkien's creation. "Moving at the speed of plot" is the watchword here.

What stood out the most to me about Shadows of Angmar was that the LOTRO development team wasn't afraid to make one of the big baddies a woman, and a clever, cunning, yet complex woman at that. It is something that you'd not see in Tolkien's work itself, outside of perhaps Ungoliant or Shelob, but in a game designed for the 21st Century it worked very well.

I can see the Tolkien purists not liking the Shadows of Angmar epic questline, but then again I can also see them disliking LOTRO itself in the same way that they dislike the LotR movies: if it doesn't religiously adhere to the books, then it must not be worth playing/watching. What I do believe, however, is that you can remain faithful to the source material while expanding upon it. The devs made logical conclusions based on the source material, and that enhance the overall MMO experience. Even when the source material indicated some things, such as the Dunedain of the North maintaining some settlements in The Angle** after the fall of Arthedain, that didn't detract from the story driven placement of the hidden Ranger encampment of Esteldin in the North Downs.

***

The funny thing is, even with some revisions to zones such as the Trollshaws, LOTRO is still decidedly an Old School style MMO. The Epic questline takes you back and forth across Eriador in a way that is simply not done in WoW these days. While such trooping back and forth isn't realistic due to the timeline involved, it does provide an epic scope to the story.

Another thing that made my leveling easier was my familiarity with MMO tropes. While the mini-Reds will do their own thing and collect quests here and there, I'm so used to MMO-style quest collection*** that I just leveled very quickly without intending to. I'd not exactly say I power leveled, because to me power leveling is something that takes you from L1 through L50 in a week or two, but the mini-Reds kept remarking on how quickly I shot up to the low 50s. "When seven years playing MMOs you reach, leveling as fast you will" was my reply.

I also had the benefit of them having used my account for their initial forays into LOTRO, so they'd unlocked some areas --such as Forochel and Angmar-- without me needing to use my steady collection of Turbine Points to keep moving forward. But for me the biggest boon was that they unlocked the gold cap, which helped me out a LOT. Especially when I finally had to dip my toe into the auction house to buy a weapon, as my (then) current weapon was woefully inadequate for the zones I was in.

***

When the Epic storyline is complete, you really have a sense of accomplishment. It may not be THE epic storyline of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age, but you can be satisfied that you struck a blow against the Shadow in the North.

But the best part? You didn't need to raid to complete the story. Sure, you can raid, but it's not the necessary to finish the Shadows of Angmar. I can see where this is the genesis of SWTOR's idea for the original class story to be completely separate --and designed for solo play-- away from the rest of the SWTOR stories. Sure, you can get a fellowship to help, but if you play it smart you can solo the Epic questline courtesy of the Inspiration buff.

Now, I suppose it's time to grind a bit to unlock the Moria expac....

And go back to SWTOR, too, I suppose.





*Well, to me they were obvious.

**Just south of Rivendell. It's location would be ideal to have the protection of the House of Elrond without drawing attention to itself.

***You know, the type that focuses on a single area from a quest hub and then you move onto the next quest hub. LOTRO isn't so neat and clean in that regard, but compartmentalizing the story by focusing on a single quest hub at a time speeds things up considerably. Besides, why would you want to kill all those bears twice??

A Real Life Intervention

I realize that as gamers, it's easy to focus on games or the entertainment world to such an extent that the real world is some other place way on the other side of the galaxy.* But there are times when the real world intrudes and you have to pay attention.

This past week has been one of those times.

I know this has gotten airplay as far away as Deutche Welle and NHK (Japan), but there are people who still haven't heard of the wildfires in Alberta, Canada. The wildfires, fed by a perfect storm of weather conditions, forced the evacuation of the entire city of Fort McMurray (80,000+ people). While the latest reports said that most of the city was saved, there has been a high personal cost.

From BBC.com.

Fellow MMO blogger and Blizzard Watch columnist Stacey Landry, who uses the name Vidyala on her blog Manalicious and webcomic From Draenor With Love, has family personally affected by the fire. Her brother, Matt Landry, and her sister-in-law, Aileen, lost their home to the fire.

To help her brother and sister-in-law get back on their feet, Stacey has created a GoFundMe campaign to provide some assistance. If you can, please help by visiting the site and helping to spread the word.

Matt and Aileen's Lost House Fund by GoFundMe




*Or ocean. But still reachable by flightpath. 

As the Old World Turns

When you have a Facebook group promoting your WoW "legacy server", like Nostralius has, you're not exactly hiding in plain sight*.

So, while it isn't exactly a surprise that Blizz eventually told Nostralius to shut it down, I am surprised at the latest news from the Nostralius front: the Nostralius team is scheduling a meeting with Blizzard at the Blizzard campus.

I can't imagine much coming out of the meeting, as Blizzard really holds all the cards here, but if this meeting does come out at least it gives them the opportunity to give the appearance of concern for what I'm going to dub the legacy community. I suppose I could call the pirates, or snobs, or whatever, but the reasons for wanting to play on a legacy server are likely as varied as reasons for playing on any MMO.

Well, outside of the "fun" part. I can't imagine anyone continuing to play for very long if they're not having fun.

But as for fun....

I'm in front of the Hobbit.

Some fireworks from the LOTRO 9th Anniversary event.






*I realize not everybody has a FB account, but if you don't you'll have to trust me that it really does exist.

Resisting The Sirens' Song

I've been debating what to do when I finally reach the limit on the LOTRO story and I have to start grinding Turbine Points to pick up another region. In this case, the next region is a biggie, points-wise: The Mines of Moria. I'm very sure I won't be able to grind enough points to purchase the expac before the 9th Anniversary special disappears, so I've come to the conundrum whether to break down and actually purchase some Turbine Points to get this taken care of.

In the meantime, I've been considering that maybe the SWTOR story has advanced far enough that I can jump back into it and not have the urge to stay up all night finishing the story.

And then, on the heels of the Nostralius server shutdown, came this in my e-mail folder:

Just like last time, the timing makes you wonder whether
someone from Blizz is actually reading this blog. Nah....

The thing is, I've done this already. I logged back in for a week and puttered around, but low level BGs were about impossible to get into, and Trade Chat was as bad as ever.* I wasn't about to break my traditional WoW expac methodology and use the instant-L90 boost when I prefer to start at L1 and level all the way up, and seven days is not exactly enough time to level all the way to L90 anyway.

If Warlords of Draenor is as awesome as the e-mail claims, I can wait. By the time my toons got from L1 all the way up to the current expac**, everybody had cleared out of the leveling zones. None of the insane competition for resources worked out well for exploring each new world.

The places that I pause the most and come back to whenever I level are the BC zones. I don't know why, exactly, but the BC zones just fascinate me. Northrend had the occasional hit and miss zone --Boring Tundra, anyone?-- but even Outland's stinker zone Blade's Edge Mountains had plenty of interesting quests and scenery to get lost in. It's a shame that Outland is basically on life support while the devs focus on the new shiny.

Thanks for the offer, Blizz, but I think I'll pass. Now, if you get around to creating a legacy server, I'd be very interested, but I already know the answer to that one.





*I hear people --the mini-Reds among them-- complain about some of the "sellers" on World Chat on LOTRO's Gladden-US server, and I laugh. If they want to see what a really bad MMO chat is like, they need to watch Trade Chat some day.

**If you count Wrath of the Lich King, I've done it four times. I could count my Warlock for a fifth time, but while he made it to Cataclysm's leveling zones he never got to max level. I got too burned out getting creamed in BGs in the Warlock-weak Cata expac.