Hail and Well Met

Some thunderstorms and the occasional stray tornado blew through our area last night. Luckily the damage found nearby was minimal --only a few downed wires and flash floods-- but the lightning and wind woke me up at around 1:30 AM. I rolled over and eventually went back to sleep, but in that half-awake state I mumbled to myself that "at least I didn't have to worry about this crap on Taris."

Hail this size you won't find in a steaming jungle with toxic swamps.

Which actually was a pretty good point.

Well, outside of the fact that I'm not so sure I'd want to fight Rakghouls and thunderstorms at the same time: "Rak-nado! Coming to the SyFy Channel in 2018!"

Weather has always been a tricky thing in MMOs. The classic single world MMO, such as WoW or LOTRO, could have weather easily integrated into it, but the multiple world MMO (such as SWTOR and to a minor extent Wildstar*) weather takes a back seat to an individual world's atmosphere. Think of it this way: while you can spend a lot of time --gamewise-- in a WoW zone or an entire continent (think Northrend, for example), your average time spent on a small slice of a planet in SWTOR is comparatively small.

But even on games such as WoW, region shaking weather such as a monsoon or a hurricane or even thunderstorms is a very rare event.

The only pure weather event that I can think of that I see with (somewhat) regularity is the numbing and visibility killing fog that emanates out of Forochel in Middle-earth. I've seen that fog creep all the way down to Evendim** from time to time, which causes massive visibility issues for a game that tends to rely upon old-style line of sight for figuring out where the maguffin you're supposed to find is located. But rain and snow in LOTRO aren't that big of a deal, just like how they are in WoW.

From hiveminer.com and flicker.com.
When it is nighttime, that fog is really creepy.

In fact, I'd argue that the only big "weather" event for WoW was back in Cataclysm, when Deathwing would randomly blast an area with his dragonfire in a "hellfire and damnation" souped-up version of a global/raid/world boss.

My "Stood in the Fire" achievement came in the
Blasted Lands after a 5-man run, but I unfortunately never
took a screenshot. This was from viktdk.wordpress.com.

The big problem with a huge weather event is that it would require more than just "oh look, rain" on screen. You need to implement a form of phasing, where you have trees losing branches and rain (or snow or hail) bouncing off of houses and other "background" items. And for all of that effort, you'd expect the devs to put in a few quests as well. I mean, why go to all that extra work just for a background effect when people are clamoring for raids, instances, and questlines? I can see where at the height of WoW the devs there could tinker with that sort of thing, but the age of the 10 million subscriber MMO seems to have passed, taking with it the budget necessary for such side projects.

In the end, I guess that MMOs will continue to do what they have, and have a region with "rain" or "snow flurries" which turns on and off from time to time. It's a shame, really, because no matter how MMOs add and modify regions, without the impact of weather --and severe weather-- the world will feel static after a while.

Without having to worry about dodging downed tree branches.





*For those not aware, in Wildstar some of the zones are actually on moons of Nexus.

**Unless that's a bug, but hey, I don't mind bugs like that.

In Memoriam: Loren K. Wiseman

One of the RPG design greats, Loren K. Wiseman, passed away on February 15th.

No, Loren isn't the household name that Gary Gygax was, but he was a very influential RPG designer in his own right. He was a co-founder of Games Design Workshop (GDW), and a co-creator of the SF RPG Traveller. Later, he was a designer on the Steve Jackson Games' interpretation of the Traveller universe, GURPS Traveller.

This is a decade old fan made video promoting

the Traveller RPG. It uses the Pirates of 

the Caribbean theme to great effect.

I've never had the chance to play classic Traveller, but I've designed a campaign for the Mongoose Publishing version of Traveller, and have been waiting for some free time to run a campaign with the mini-Reds. Traveller is one of those RPGs that has a reputation, mainly because the character creation process involved your character having a "career" prior to joining your adventures. And yes, Classic Traveller had the possibility that your character would die during the career phase. (Honest!) Later versions of Traveller have done away with that aspect of character creation, but the Mongoose version does retain the possibility that your character suffers an injury that generates minuses on your character sheet.

As for GDW, it was a very influential wargame publisher and competitor to Avalon Hill and SPI in the late 70s and 80s. I've played a game or two of GDW's arguably most well known title, A House Divided*, and it is a good introduction into the overall strategies that went into the ACW. It is by no means a very deep or "authentic" game --you'll likely want to look at GMT Games' For The People for that-- but it is a fun game that can still be found today.

This is the version I'm most familiar with.
From Rick Byrens, via boardgamegeek.com.

Loren was active on the Steve Jackson Games' forums, where I conversed with him once or twice. He always seemed like a nice guy who simply loved making games.

He'll be missed.





*It's a grand strategy game of the American Civil War, now published by Mayfair Games.

A Cloud of Doom Following Me

On certain MMOs, such as LOTRO or SWTOR, you have a feel for what is going to come. In SWTOR, the more class stories you play, the more you find recurring NPCs. It feels distinctly weird when you know the ultimate fate of those NPCs when you encounter them on another class story, like Ianna Cel on Taris. For those who have played mainly Republic toons, Ianna does make an appearance in an Imperial class story.*

I've occasionally wondered whether her students have
questioned her ethics in pursuit of her goals.
From swtor-spy.com

Star Trek Online had a mid-teens questline where a Federation toon has to go back in time to save an outpost from an attack from "ghosts" (it's a Next Gen baddie), and you encounter McCoy and Scotty on the outpost. It feels, well, weird seeing them in their TOS uniforms, knowing how things work out for them in the movies and in the Next Gen television series.

Bones was on the station a year prior to joining
Kirk and the rest of the Enterprise crew.
From sto.gamepedia.com.

In WoW, you get that feeling of impending doom the most when the Bronze Dragonflight drafts you into correcting the timeline, most notably in the 5-man instances and raids from the BC and Wrath expansions. My personal favorite is the Culling of Stratholme, because you get the long intro grounding the WC3 era instance with the current Wrath timeline. And for those of us who have never played any of the Warcraft RTS games, it's quite the revelation. Sure, we knew that Arthas became the Lich King, because reasons, but it's a surprise that he made the leap from "infected grain" to "kill everybody to keep the Scourge of Undeath from spreading". It's the equivalent of saying "there's an ebola outbreak in Orlando, Florida, so let's nuke the entire city just to make sure we've got it contained."

This is the part that everybody skips, so I

thought it a good idea to post this YouTube

clip for reference. (Berial92 posted it.)

But LOTRO has the dubious distinction of having the overall plot known to tens of millions of people throughout the world, and millions of those people know a ton of minute detail about Middle-earth. And no matter what you try, you know how things will work out in the end.

Take the Dunlendings, for example.

You spend the second part of the Grey Company Epic Questline in Enedwaith, trying to assess the threat of the Dunlendings and attempting to get them to resist Saruman.** But the thing is, people who have read the appendices in The Return of the King know the ultimate result: Saruman dominates the Dunlendings, and gets them to join with his uruks to attack Rohan.

And when I reached Dunland itself and not only began working the Epic Questline but landed enough LOTRO points to get Rise of Isengard,*** I discovered similar feelings of anguish. I cruised through the Dunland and encountered Prince Theodred, son of King Theoden of Rohan. I wanted to somehow warn him of the impending doom he faced, but I knew that was just not possible. Nor would I have been able to change the future, because LOTRO's writers have done a good job of making an impeding train wreck seem avoidable, even plausible, until in-game reality kicks you in the pants.

Grimbold, about the night your liege goes back
in time....Oh wait, wrong franchise.

Makes me wonder how Cassandra must have felt.****






*I'd kind of like to have seen Thana Vesh in a Republic class story, but no such luck. She's an NPC who pretty much dominates every conversation that she's involved with.

**The first part of the questline is simply "getting the band back together" before they head off in response to Aragorn's Galadriel's summons.

***I've discovered that one way of racking up LOTRO points is to work on alts. And since I now have 8 slots courtesy of a premium account I can collect LOTRO points a lot more quickly. (The number 8 came from 7 slots for premium account, which is like the SWTOR mid-tier in that you have to have purchased coins/points/whatever using money, and 1 for purchasing that separately from the LOTRO store prior to me spending the money in the first place.)

****From Greek Mythology, she was the daughter of King Priam of Troy who was (in)famous for making prophecies that were never believed, courtesy of a curse Apollo inflicted on her for not succumbing to his advances.

Finding Value out of Gaming

Rocky: I can't do it.
Adrian: What?
Rocky: I can't beat him.
Adrian: Apollo?
Rocky: Yeah. I've been out there walking around, thinking. I mean, who am I kidding? I ain't even in the guy's league.
Adrian: (sighs) What're we gonna do?
Rocky: I dunno.
Adrian: You worked so hard.
Rocky: Yeah, it don't matter. Because I was nobody before.
Adrian: Don't say that.
Rocky: C'mon, Adrian. It's true. I was nobody. But it don't matter either, y'know? 'Cause I was thinking. It really don't matter if I lose this fight. It really don't matter if this guy opens my head, either. 'Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody's ever gone the distance with Creed. And if I can go that distance, see, if that bell rings and I'm still standing, I'm gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I wasn't just another bum from the neighborhood.
--From Rocky (1976). Screenplay by Sylvester Stallone.



As I've occasionally alluded to in past posts, gaming is something I've done since I was a kid. I'm old enough to (barely) remember Pong when it came out, but I grew up in a household that played a lot of classic board and card games.* But at the same time, my parents got caught up in the Satanic Panic of the 80s and threw out our D&D collection right before I finished 8th Grade, and while I was allowed to play video games on our old Texas Instruments home computer, we never had a gaming console.**

And I still never understood the difference between playing Tunnels of Doom on the TI-99/4A and cracking open a Players Handbook and playing a Paladin.

Ooo, a chest!
From crpgaddict.blogspot.com.

Oh sure, the video game is pretty much an abstract dungeon crawl, but the dungeons my friends and I made back in the early 80s were pretty similar as well.*** Even Tunnels of Doom had Demons as monsters at the bottom levels of the dungeon, so you can't argue that there wasn't a "Satanic" aspect to the game. The only thing I can think of is that D&D and the other pencil and paper RPGs encouraged imagination, which when coupled to what the Satanic Panic people called "the occult", led to people going down a Dark Path.

Hey, look! An AD&D Players Handbook!!
From Army of Darkness and makeagif.com.
"Klaatu... Verata... Mlkhpffphff."

You know, the whole Necronomicon/Evil Book concept.

***

The reason why I'm bringing this up again is that I've been doing some thinking about what gaming has meant to me over the years.

While it has meant a primary form of physical interaction between people --friends and acquaintances sitting around a table or a television set-- it has also meant something more.

Games as Generational Connections

It's no secret that I've used games to hang around with my kids. The mini-Reds have been indoctrinated into gamer culture from a young age, and they've grown to become gamers themselves. Whereas other families might discuss sports****, we discuss games. Gen Con is an annual pilgrimage. Smash Bros games devolve into frenetic free-for-alls with all the excited screams and boasts that you'd see on a basketball court.

Some of my favorite memories as a father have come from gaming as well, such as the time when I first introduced the mini-Reds to RPGs, using the Savage Worlds system and a pulp setting from Triple Ace Games to give the kids a chance to be their own Indiana Jones. Or the time when my brother-in-law ran a Pathfinder one-shot for me and the mini-Reds, and the youngest mini-Red went off script and did something totally unexpected and stuck her PC's hand in the fire in the center of the room we were exploring.***** Or the times I ran instances with them in SWTOR and LOTRO.

I've no doubt that when my oldest goes off to college I'll use MMOs to keep in touch with her. I can imagine her occasionally logging into SWTOR or LOTRO to just putz around and occasionally group up, just before heading out to dinner or hanging out with friends.

Both are from giphy.com, and from Field of Dreams.
Go ahead and get a tissue. That scene, where Ray talks with
the ghost of his father, still tears me up.

Games as Emotional Grounding

I may have played sports, but I was no jock.

It may come as a surprise to those who never played competitive or select sports, but there is a hierarchy to those who play team sports. The starters and main subs off the bench get the lion's share of attention, and the rest of the subs are, for all intents and purposes, there to round out a large enough of a squad for practices. Some teams have a byrule of having everybody play at least part of every game, but the competitive/select teams do not; they want to win, not build character.******

However, just because you play sports doesn't mean that you're a jock or a member of jock culture. I was always an outsider on the teams that I played on; I had different interests than most of my teammates, and I never hung around with them outside of practice or games. Perhaps this was best illustrated during the basketball banquet during my 8th Grade: the team was gathered to one side, and everybody had a chair to sit on.... Except me. None were to be seen, so I had to stand.

From all over the internet. Really. I found
at least six links without even trying hard.

And people wondered why I never hung out with the jocks outside of practice and games.

RPGs gave me a chance to feel worthwhile when life stuck me on the low end of the school pecking order. You get the ability to be the hero of your own adventure, working with friends to achieve a goal worthy of an SF&F novel. And for a kid who was head over heels into JRR Tolkien, there wasn't much more than I could want.

CRPGs and MMOs have a similar appeal, where you're the hero of the story, but instead of purely in the mind's eye you can see it up there on the screen. It also allows you to feel like you matter on no small level, and to an insecure kid that can mean a lot.

If there's one thing that I would wish for our community, it is that we open our arms more to embrace the marginalized. It's pretty well known that the gamer community has issues with people who want to shut the door and pretend that games and gamers are an exclusive boys club, behaving like the Puritans once they reached the shores of New England.# RPG companies and gamers have come a long way, but we've got a long way to go.

We're not there yet, but I really love this drawing.
From imgur.com/gallery/MZwow

Games as Drama##

Sure, there are your games that are abstract or have a minimal theme --such as Checkers or Go-- but unless the drama involves telling tales about escapades in a game of Poker, there's not much in the way of drama to those games. I don't look at the Euro boardgame Puerto Rico and think that there's a lot of drama in shipping goods as a colonial governor. Still, drama can leak in from player interaction or an epic match ("Dude, remember that time I only had a rook and a king and I STILL beat you?"), but RPGs have drama built into their DNA. CRPGs and MMOs have a story to tell, and you're along for the ride. Want to be Link and save the world (again)? Shepard needs to fight the Reapers and save the galaxy, are you game? I hear the Burning Legion has returned to Azeroth and the Horde/Alliance need heroes; are you up for it?

Even games that are more about the fights and bashing skulls (such as Bayonetta, Gears of War, or God of War) have a story to them. Drama can be interchanged for "plot" at this point, but in an RPG it means more because you want to feel like your choices matter. Non-MMO CRPGs can pull this off more easily because the developers can accommodate different choices in-game, but MMOs have the great advantage of player interaction that a CRPG can't hope to match. A visit to any MMO gamer blog will demonstrate the value of player interactions to an MMO player. Sure, there are people who are present to play the economic game or "win" the raiding/PvP game, but the reason why they play an MMO versus a single player CRPG is because you can hang with and fight alongside your friends (or friends of convenience).

Franchise fans are their own geek subgroup, too.
Hey I could have put Trekkies or Tolkien fans here, but at least
Zelda is CRPG related.  From Pinterest.

The pencil and paper games, RPGs and theme heavy boardgames, have drama as part of their central makeup. The whole point of RPGs is to get friends together and tell a story, whether that is by exploring a dungeon, taking part in an epic quest, or even dealing with eking out a living on the edges of the galaxy. The heavily thematic boardgames, such as Runebound or Fury of Dracula, borrow from RPGs to help the players tell a story while playing the game.

Of course, unintended drama can wreck a game. I've been in guilds that have imploded because of unnecessary drama, D&D groups that blew up because they either got too large or we weren't following the DM's direction to take the game###. And yes, I've been in game groups that had issues where the DM's SO received preferential treatment. It wasn't pleasant.

If you've ever been a DM, you'll appreciate this.
My oldest looked at the last one especially and laughed.
The place where I found this (via Google search) doesn't resolve anymore,
so I've no idea who to attribute it to.

Not everybody likes drama. Hell, look at the complaints about Dragon Age 2 from a story perspective and you see that a certain subset of gamers simply do not like games that emphasized story at (what they thought) was the expense of gameplay, as if it was a zero sum game. My wife still is reluctant to play pencil and paper RPGs because an ex was an obsessive controlling DM, and rightly or wrongly she internally associates "asshat ex-boyfriend" with playing RPGs. Games such as Mario Kart or Settlers of Catan are much more in her wheelhouse, because she prefers to not go too heavily into drama (both good and bad).

But in the end, the bonds you make in a guild or a gaming group can last a lifetime; you fought together, laughed together, goofed around together, and even cried together. Friendships like that are what keep game worlds alive.

***

Gaming has certainly changed me, given me an anchor, and helped me with my empathy. As a social outcast growing up, gaming was a lifeline to get me to interact with people that I would ordinarily never associate with. I'm still not perfect; I can tend to act like a mother hen to my friends (online and offline) when I should simply just keep my mouth shut and let them deal with their own shit the way they want to####. But gaming has made me more empathetic, more loyal, and more outgoing than I would have been without it. Sure, it's not like my Dad is going to call me up to talk about the latest expac in SWTOR or WoW#####, but when a bunch of my friends get together to play some Smash Bros and boardgames, we've got that same connection.

Okay, enough about me. What about you? What have games and gaming meant to you? How do they define you (if at all)? Do they keep you going, do they inspire you, and do they help you connect with people?





*Rook? Yep. Uncle Wiggly? Played it. Hearts? Of course; I thought I was really good at Hearts until I got to college and would routinely get my ass handed to me by my dorm friends. As for other games that people might not know much about today, Authors springs to mind. I think I still have my card deck of Authors around somewhere; I'll have to keep an eye out for it the next time I clean parts of the basement.

**True story: to get me to work on my free throws for basketball, my dad made me a deal that if I made 10 free throws in a row we would get an Atari 2600 console. I spent the better part of that summer and fall trying for that elusive 10 in a row, because I wanted to spend more than 5 minutes at a time playing Asteroids. After countless tries, one day the next summer I finally reached that goal only to have my dad renege on his promise.

***My very first adventure consisted of the following encounter: "You open the door at the end of the hallway and see 10 RED DRAGONS!!!" Needless to say, this 1st Level Fighter died.

****We still talk about college basketball a bit, but not to the extent that my neighbors talk about sports with their kids, or even I talk about sports with my father.

*****My brother-in-law did what any good DM does, and he improvised. He caused a spectre to arise out of the flaming brazier and attack her, which was a bit of a problem because we were already in a fight with some goblins. My youngest's two siblings stared at her, aghast. "What did you go and do THAT for??!!!" one of them wailed. "I wanted to see what would happen," she replied, nonplussed. (For the record, we did survive, but that was because I was the Cleric. As usual.)

******Sure, if you go to a random select team's website they'll say that they want to build character and sportsmanship, but my experiences say "win first, everything else second".

#It wasn't until I went to college that I was exposed to gamer girls, and I look back on my early days playing D&D with regret that I didn't think of asking any of the girls I knew if they wanted to pay. I'd vowed to not make the same mistake with my kids, and the mini-Reds have all grown up to become gamers in their own right.

##I could have easily called this the "Bioware Section", but they don't have a monopoly on good drama within a game. It only seems they do.

###My current D&D 3.0 game group grew out of one such blowup back in college. The DM had scripted everything --and I do mean everything-- to the point where we felt like we were there just to be "yes men" to his dramatic writing. When any of us wanted to do something offbeat or wanted to follow something not on the script, he blew up. Needless to say, he decided that we weren't worth his time and walked out, and one of us said "Hey, I've been a DM before. I'll take over and we'll start from scratch."

####"Stop being a creeper, Dad." "You're not an amateur psychologist, Red. Shut up." I've heard them plenty of times. At the same time, if somebody needs a hand or wants to talk, I want to be there for them. I remember what it's like to be isolated and not have anyone to talk to.

#####For the record, he calls almost daily during college basketball season. There's always a game going on that provides (you guessed it) drama.

For a Monday Morning

I know that Mondays can drag for a lot of people, so here's some music featuring New Age artist David Arkenstone and his ex-wife Diane.

Yes, it's titled Music Inspired by Middle-earth. The CD that the YouTube video was ripped from was released in 2001, and was unconnected with the release of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Somehow I missed this entirely, so I've been catching up this morning.

Not Terribly Important, but You'd Never Guess It

I've been watching the pageviews on PC the past couple of weeks, and it seems that there's a lot more web scourers out there these days. Almost like clockwork, every few days the pageviews spike and I get an equally distributed number of pageviews across all of PC.

Given that this site is neither particularly large nor well read, this can be somewhat amusing.

The thing that I have noticed the most is that the Russian sources of pageviews has dropped off since the first of the year, and US and (to a lesser extent) Chinese based sources have been scouring the site.

Almost makes me want to turn on the ads for PC, just to see what sort of money I could rack up while these web crawlers are out and about. But knowing my luck, it'll end up being filtered out of the pageviews from Google's perspective.

The Land of the Spray Tans

I've now reached that point in LOTRO where I have overshot my in-game zone purchases, but the Epic Questline is current and goes through that area.

Dunland, Dunland, Dunland!
The place where I most want to be!
(Apologies to Monty Python.)

Oh, I've had that happen before --as a free account, that happens rather frequently while I frantically grind enough Turbine LOTRO Points to purchase the next zone-- but I'm now at an intersection between a couple of expacs as well as the main game.

Enedwaith could be purchased by itself and wasn't linked into the Mines of Moria expac at all; it was kind of a bridge zone between the main game and the Rise of Isengard expac. But Dunland itself is not only the main Rise of Isengard zone, it also contains hooks for Riders of Rohan. It feels distinctly weird to have a zone that had an incredibly minimal impact on The Lord of the Rings itself* be such a crossroads for the MMO.

"I'm looking for a place to get a spray tan. Who does yours?"
"I don't need to tell you anything, Duvodiad."

And if Enedwaith is any indicator, the Rise of Isengard expac (and Grey Company Epic Questline) marks a crossroads in the game engine itself. It was released a year after Cataclysm, and like that expac for WoW, it also makes heavy use of phasing in game to push the story along. I also noticed that the questing itself was more streamlined and less old school, which indicates to me that Turbine learned the same lessons that Blizzard did (and implemented in Wrath and Cataclysm), but with the notable exception that they didn't tear down and rebuild the entire Shadows of Angmar "Old World".**

I tried screen capturing the "fading" that I've observed in Enedwaith when I pop out of the crafting hut in Lhanuch to no avail, but if you've been there late in the questline, it's like riding up to the Wrathgate in WoW and seeing things flicker into the proper phase, only on a smaller scale.

Who knew they ate burritos in Dunland?

Enedwaith --and Dunland, to be honest-- feel smaller in physical size compared to other LOTRO areas. The devs seemed to make up for that size issue by cramming in more enemies per square inch, and also making them respawn much more quickly than before.

That said, I enjoyed what I've seen so far of these zones. Turbine had made a smart development choice to make the Dunlendings more nuanced than Tolkien did. In the Tolkien universe, the "uncouth" Dunlendings were lumped into the larger group of Men that would have been called Easterlings in the First Age, and people easily swayed under Morgoth and Sauron.*** But Turbine went a different route, showing that the Dunlendings are far from a monolithic group, and have various levels of trust and suspicion with Saruman. The only unifying part of their culture is their dislike for the Rohirrim, who they feel displaced them from their rightful lands.

I keep wondering whether some of the Dunlendings will make the mental leap from "Saruman lied to us and manipulated us into fighting alongside him" to "what if Saruman is manipulating the Horse Lords as well?" But I suspect that might be beyond their reach, given their longstanding feuds with the Rohirrim.

But until I grind enough LOTRO points****, I'll be running around taking screenshots.

"Got any sunscreen?"
"Really, Duvodiad. Is that all you think about?"
"Have you SEEN my skintone? I burn and peel!"

*Even in the Appendices, whereas Forochel and Angmar had a decent amount of impact in the history of Arnor/Arthedain. The Silmarillion and Unfinished tales focused more on other parts of Eriador than Dunland itself. Like its people, Dunland is pretty much a forgotten zone.

**Yes, I'm aware that Turbine reworked the quests in the older zones to make things more streamlined; I noticed that when I came back to the game after minimal involvement since 2010 or so. That said, Turbine did the smart thing and didn't blow up the entire area, ruining the timeline in the process.

***As opposed to the "noble" Edain, who fought alongside the Elves and from whom eventually sprung the Numenorians/Dunedain and the Rohirrim. The difference between the two groups was simple: Numenorians followed Elros to Numenor at the dawn of the Second Age, and the Rohirrim (as one of the Middle Men) did not.

****Actually, I'm not too far off, so here's hoping.

Give Up the Funk

I am presently sick, which means that I'm trying unsuccessfully to get to sleep on an (early) Wednesday morning. Kind of hard to sleep when you cough every minute or so, and cold medication occasionally makes you think there are dancing LOTRO Hobbits in your room, moving to the beat of Parliament Funkadelic.*

From the archives. Kind of like this, only MORE lights.
And a disco ball.

But since I was perusing the internet instead, I stumbled across this little article about actor Kristen Bell and her husband Dax Shepard. It seems that after the Golden Globes awards, instead of going to an after party they went back home to play Settlers of Catan. Because, Game Night.

I know that we're all aware of some celebrities who play games, such as Salma Hayek and the late Robin Williams, but it's still a great thing to see geeky pursuits making themselves known in pop culture.

Let the after party begin. @daxshepard @goldenglobes @settelersofcatan #GoldenGlobes #settelersofcatan

A photo posted by kristen bell (@kristenanniebell) on Jan 8, 2017 at 8:21pm PST

I'm not known for dressing up for Game Night, but I think they can be forgiven 

to wanting to get the game rolling ASAP. Besides, older versions of Settlers 

used to take a while to get set up and going.

*It actually made sense at the time it was going on. I swear. I do think that the reason why P-Funk was in my head was because Bootsy Collins, the bassist for P-Funk, is a local musician.

Welcome back, Mr. Kotter

...so, what happened?

I've been away from the internet and gaming/blogger space --with a precious few exceptions-- for the past few weeks.

As you can see from my previous entry, I was around enough to have taken note of Carrie Fisher's passing. For someone who had such an incredible impact on our geeky lives*, the outpouring of grief and sadness on her passing was therapeutic.

And SWTOR was no exception:

Aside from Carrie's passing, I've been totally out of the loop of the MMO and gaming circles to an extent that I've not been in years. Not even during the Grand College Tour this past year did I just drop off the face of the earth, gaming-wise.

I did take advantage of a Steam gift card to buy a few items --such as The Witcher Trilogy in my typical way of waiting until the hype subsided before I pulled the trigger-- but I made a deliberate choice to not peruse any gaming news.

In a very real sense, I needed that break. I've found it increasingly difficult to simply stop paying attention to gaming news, even in my down time. Recharging my batteries by disconnecting was a good thing, and it also gave me a chance to reflect on the best part of gaming: being with friends and family who share a common interest.

On a closing note, there's one game that we got over the holidays that I am really excited to play. But it isn't a video game at all.

This is the Z Man 2009 revision of the 1985 classic.

*And while I was the perfect age for thinking Carrie Fisher was hot in Return of the Jedi, she wasn't a big crush of mine. Sorry, Ross from Friends. If you had to push me into naming a name from that immediate era, I'd have to go with Katdarina Witt, the East German figure skater.

Farewell, Princess

From picsofcelebrities.com.
(Yes, that's a real website.)

...you were my favorite Skywalker.

In Other News...

...I'm likely the last person in the gamer universe to notice the cleverly-integrated-into-the-comic reveal that the face of Overwatch, Tracer, is gay.*

From Blizzard. And Polygon.

Here's the Polygon post on the subject.

I personally think it's a great idea, not strictly from a representation PoV, but also from a story angle. Having perused the comic itself, it just simply fits with the story. And Tracer herself, really. Not so much as a surprise (in my mind) as a feeling that everything clicks.

Which is as it should be.





*Or at the very least, bi.

Bye Bye Turbine

Yes, that's right. Standing Stones Games, a new independent studio, has purchased both Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online from Turbine.

I guess that means that Warner Brothers won't be involved (directly) with either game's future.

Here's the release found on LOTRO.com.

As for what this means in the future, I guess we'll find out. But one thing is certain: corporate WB won't be dictating layoffs to the LOTRO staff. Of course, that means that if LOTRO doesn't continue with a decent revenue stream it'll have a direct impact to the staffing (small businesses feel that more acutely than large ones), but political shenanigans from WB corporate won't have a direct impact on the game(s).

I'm going to have to figure out what's up with my new "premier membership" or whatever it is. I suspect that since I'd bought some Turbine Points months and months ago to get some milestones (I was tired of taking upwards of 1/2 hour to ride from Rivendell to Forochel) that I suddenly got bumped up into a middle level tier where I have a lot more character slots per server. I'll see what other surprises await me going forward.

Oh look, another seasonal event!

I'm having flashbacks.

I just saw the YouTube clip for Overwatch's Winter Wonderland event, and I felt pulled in a couple of different directions.

It was a fun little clip, down to the Widowmaker part, but it felt like a mashup of Wildstar and WoW, wrapped up in a little bow provided by Blizzard.

The WoW part, not a surprise. After all, it is a fellow property of Blizzard's. But Wildstar? Well, it was just cartoonish and goofy enough to fit in the Wildstar universe, even though it's a completely different game. And Wildstar, like WoW, doesn't take itself entirely seriously. Finally, while Wildstar's graphics are rougher and far more Western influenced than Overwatch's, it does have a similar feel to the color and art design.

Or perhaps it's just me, having imbibed a bit tonight.

You'd Think I'd Know Better, Part XXVIII

Sometimes, it's better to just come right out and admit it.

I got smashed by a boss that's 29 levels lower than me.

You'd think that I'd know better, particularly since I've had this happen before with instance and heroic bosses (old SWTOR 4 man heroics and Age of Conan 6 person heroics), but nooo... I don't learn.

This is what I prefer to call The WoW Effect, where in WoW a non-raid boss simply stops being a threat once you get, oh, 15 levels or so higher than that boss. As any one of my top level WoW toons, I used to crash the low level instances I never got a chance to pop up on the LFG menu, such as Scholomance or Stratholme.* On Neve and Tomakan, I farmed Magister's Terrace until I finally got Exalted with the Shattered Sun. As Azshandra on L90, I farmed the Pit of Saron until that blasted Battered Hilt dropped so I could do the Quel'delar quest line.

But try to do that sort of thing with other MMOs, and you're likely to run into trouble.

There's a boss in the upper 20s area of Conall's Valley in Age of Conan that I've yet to beat. He's a Ymirish General, and in spite of the major level difference (I'm presently L56 and he is L28), he simply hits too hard for my Barbarian to take him out. I don't have any damage mitigation that a tank does, so I get the full effect of this Ymir's hits. Sorry, Charlie, but AoC doesn't allow me to simply outlevel a boss to the point where his hits don't cause damage. Regular enemies can still hit --at a greatly reduced rate-- but bosses don't get that treatment.

The thing is, I've known about the Age of Conan boss limitation for (primarily) solo players for a while now. But I wasn't expecting a similar situation on LOTRO.

***

The instance in question is The Tomb of Elendil in Annuminas** that I've had in my quest queue for a long time now. I'm starting Part III of the Epic Questline, and so when I reached Tinnudir to talk to a certain Ranger, I figured I really ought to do something about that questline. I'd read up on it and knew that the final boss takes forever and a day to beat down if you attempt it solo, so I figured my L69 Champion could handle it, as it's an instance for L40.

Well, the first thing I discovered is that yes, if enough mobs beat on you that you can die to them in the instance. If you've done the instance, the first main room straight ahead I got rid of one mob, then attempted to take out a single elite by the door.

That was my first mistake.

That elite runs into the middle of the room and then aggros everything left in the room on me. With about a half dozen DoTs on me plus about 15 enemies, I died fairly quickly. I respawned and reentered the instance, then spent about 5 minutes slowly beating up the individual mobs before tackling that elite again.

I shook my head, grumbled something, and continued onward.

Taking note of any of that type of elite throughout the rest of the dungeon crawl really slowed down my progression into the tomb, and made this instance into a full clear. I wasn't taking any chances, so that turned what I felt would be 1/2 hour run to the final boss into an hour, including resting to heal up and recharge my Power bar.

I reached the ending of the instance, which the questline said to find the maguffin, and I stealthed on over (I'm an Elf and can pull that off without being a Burglar) and kept trying to click on the maguffin.

No dice.

I unstealthed and let the intro to the final boss fight begin. "So much for being clever", I thought.

Then the final boss started hitting and drawing adds.

I went from full health to 50% in nothing flat, and I started cursing up a blue streak as I realized I was NOT going to be able to take this boss out.

The youngest mini-Red wandered over, looked over my shoulder, and said "Ooo... That's bad."

I unclenched the mouse and massaged my right hand. I hadn't realized I'd had the thing in a death grip. "No kidding. I'd figured that being 29 levels higher than this thing would be enough, but I guess not."

"Well, that explains the cussing."

"Gee, thanks."

At least my wife wasn't around, otherwise she'd think that I'd come down with a sudden case of Tourettes Syndrome.

***

Games such as LOTRO still surprise me, even though I've been playing MMOs for over seven years now. A lot of times they're good surprises, such as finding a twist in a storyline that really sucks you in, or the background scenery looking so majestic all by itself. But this, this is one of the nasty surprises. It's a kick in the pants that says, "You don't know everything, so you'd better stay cautious."

I'd better remember that about life, too.





*There was one memorable LFG run into Blackrock Depths that began in the intro area, and everybody decided to stick together to do a full run of the place. It took us about 1.5 to 2 hours, but it was an incredibly fun ride.

**For the Tolkien fanatics, yeah I know, Elendil isn't buried there. And yes, I know where he's actually buried (it's provided in Unfinished Tales). That is even referenced in the questline, so the devs definitely did their homework putting this in place.

"She has the heart of a dwarf, I will tell you that!"

At the hill’s foot Frodo found Aragorn, standing still and silent as a tree; but in his hand was a small golden bloom of elanor, and a light was in his eyes. He was wrapped in some fair memory: and as Frodo looked at him he knew that he beheld things as they had been in this same place. For the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord tall and fair; and he spoke words in the Elvish tongue to one whom Frodo could not see. Arwen vanimelda, namarie! He said, and then he drew a breath, and returning out of his thought he looked at Frodo and smiled.

`Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,’ he said, `and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me!’ And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as a living man.
--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring



It took a little over three months, but I finally finished the Mines of Moria (+ Lothlorien + Southern Mirkwood) expansion for LOTRO.

While the original LOTRO storyline, Shadows of Angmar, took a long time to really get going*, Mines of Moria starts off with a bang and then slows down into a long slog through darkness and the claustrophobic Khazad-dum.

Do not disturb the water.

Once again, hitting the L60 level cap meant that the story picks up in a way that plays to the strengths of Tolkien's creation. Interactions between Dwarves and Elves, the monumental task of actually cleansing the Mines (and what lies in the deep places of the world, as Gandalf called it), the complex nature of the Dwarves, and the omnipresent threat of Sauron all contribute to a well designed story.

Down there, you can see the camp fires of orcs.

While my few paragraphs are mostly spoiler-free, I will mention the obvious: the Fellowship's passage through Moria isn't referenced at all --after all, the Iron Garrison would have had no knowledge that the Fellowship went through the Mines-- until a PC reference is presented in Nud-Melek.

A view of the First Hall.

Lumping in Lothlorien into the Mines of Moria expansion as an additional zone to explore --similar to how The Firelands was added to WoW's Cataclysm expansion-- made perfect sense. I'd argue that while Lothlorien is larger in scope than The Firelands, it does serve a purpose as a spot for daily quests. Lothlorien also represents a spacing mechanism before the Epic Questline pushes on into Southern Mirkwood.

Across the Nanduhirion lies Lothlorien.

Again, Southern Mirkwood is an entirely new zone, much larger in scope than Lothlorien, but has fewer daily quests. It is primarily an end zone, allowing people to prep for end game fellowship quests and raids. Storywise, it is not only an End Zone for the Epic Questline, it provides an explanation for those who are familiar with the journey of The Fellowship: how is the Fellowship able to slip south along the Anduin River undetected by the obvious nearby presence of Dol Guldur and Orcs from Moria?

Even a sunny day can't drive away the gloom of Mirkwood,
in the shadow of Dol Guldur.

I remember reading in World Chat several days ago about how people liked Moria and Mirkwood at first, but after toiling in this zone for a long time without new content (sound familiar, WoW fans?) the expac began to really wear on people. I can see that happening, because it can be difficult to deal with the gloom of Southern Mirkwood --not to mention the Mines itself-- without needing to go periodically visit Bree or The Shire to enjoy the clear skies and happy faces of the NPCs.** Part of what made Shadows of Angmar better than the Mines of Moria is that the last half of the Epic Questline wasn't stuck solely in Angmar and Forochel***, but you traveled all over: Evendim, Bree, Ered Luin, North Downs, Lone Lands, Trollshaws, and Eregion. The nature of an expac is to focus on the new areas, but an expac such as the Mines of Moria is very limited in scope: you can't have the Epic Questline travel all over, because the action is all in Moria and its immediate surrounding areas. The Iron Garrison hails from Erebor and the Iron Hills, both areas far outside the scope of LOTRO.

Lothlorien is a pleasant diversion, but I miss the
sounds of Lake Nenuial in Evendim.

The timing of the Frodo's journey works against the Mines of Moria. Shadows of Angmar's latter half fits in rather neatly into the gap between when the Council of Elrond happened and the Fellowship exited Moria. As I'd previously mentioned, the travel involved in Shadows of Angmar isn't realistic (and neither is Turbine's condensing of Middle-earth into MMO sized chunks), but it does allow at least some time for the story to play itself out. The Mines of Moria doesn't have that luxury, as it has to fit into a much tighter time frame, so the game can't really afford to send you gallivanting across the length and breadth of Eriador.

At the end of the Epic Questline, I could really feel the atmosphere of Southern Mirkwood really wearing me down. And while I knew it was happening, I still wanted to push on to reach the end. The Epic Questline's end was a bit abrupt, but there were about 8+ Epilogues to fill in the gaps as to what happened after the final fight. I consider a few of them --and if you've played them you know which ones they are-- to be the true endings of this part of the story, leaving you feeling bittersweet about the whole thing.

Celeborn put it very well.

In a way, the ending of the Epic Questline in Southern Mirkwood surprised me a bit. There was a heavy reliance upon skirmishes to fill in the gaps, which is a departure from Shadows of Angmar. I don't think I minded too much, but it felt like there was an attempt to cut a few corners when it wasn't strictly necessary. SoA's endings weren't skirmishes, but they were instances you could relive via the Reflecting Pools around Eriador. In that respect, they felt more... well... personal than "just" a skirmish.

Having reached the end of the Mines of Moria expac, I know I've got another long slog ahead, this time to grind deeds so that I can start exploring into the lead-in to the Riders of Rohan expac, which I've been led to believe is the Cataclysm of LOTRO: the expac that broke the game.

We'll see about that, but I've got some time before I can find out.

Maybe I should wander Caras Galadon like the Fellowship did.
However, I do get a slightly uncomfortable feeling among
the Galadrim, like they're snickering at me behind my back.
Or that I'm like a puppy dog that they're playing with for a while.

*I'd argue that things for SoA really took off once you got to Gath Forthnir and reached the original L50 "endgame". At that point, the story had several twists and turns, involving back and forth across all of Eriador, until a satisfying (if saddening) ending is reached. I'd say that about half of the SoA story was told at the old "max level". I put that in quotes because you can keep leveling past L50, but the storyline was designed for L50. And I'm kind of grateful for that because of some of the areas you wander into in Angmar.

**The oldest mini-Red told me this story a couple of weeks ago about how someone came riding into Bree and started exclaiming in World Chat how wonderful and alive Bree was. "Been in Moria?" someone asked. "Yep," was the reply.

***Forochel gets depressing when the fog rolls in and you can't see more than a few feet in front of you. That happens in Evendim as well, but much less frequently.

Happy Birthday, WoW

Jeez, at 12 years old WoW is almost a teenager.

By Theamat on DeviantArt:

And, courtesy of Marvel's Free Comic Book Day offering of Age of Ultron (several years ago):

Now That's More Like It

Don't know what you got till it's gone
Don't know what it is I did so wrong
Now I know what I got
It's just this song
And it ain't easy to get back
Takes so long
--Don't Know What You've Got (Till It's Gone), Cinderella


The adventure I've been on the past month began when the graphics card in the main PC went belly up. I'd been thinking that we might want to upgrade some of the components over the holidays --if the bonus gods were willing to smile on us, that is-- but I'd been thinking that a new graphics card would be #2 on the list behind an SSD.

But that idea got thrown in the trash heap on November 4th.

Yeah, like this. Only with fewer cows.
From quickmeme.com.

I've already covered my adventures dealing with the Intel integrated graphics for my 3rd Gen i7 system (spoilers: they weren't happy ones), so I knew I had to shell out for a new card. And yes, I warned The Boss just how much one that would be a bit better but not top of the line would cost (~$200 US). So, with a budget in hand and potential specs a plenty, I sallied forth to do battle with the mighty graphics card market.

I used to be an NVidia fanboy from way back in the day, but I had some bad experiences with the GS series of NVidia cards in the late 2000s, so I'd switched to AMD's Radeon offerings when the current PC was built. I saw no need to change that, particularly since the AMD integrated graphics on the mini-Red's laptops ran rings around Intel's integrated graphics. If they can do that, I figured, then their dedicated cards will be good enough for me.

What I saw in research only confirmed my suspicions, as I zoomed in on the RX470 as the potential card to have. The 4 GB option in particular hit that ~$200 price point, and I had a traditional HD monitor, so I had no need for either the 8 GB or the RX480 cards. I also had a quirk of the system in that I only had a 6 pin power connector available for the graphics card, not an 8 pin, so that ended up limiting my selection to only a couple of cards.*

Namely, this one:

The Sapphire Radeon RX470 4GB. From pcworld.com.

Courtesy of my living close to Newegg's warehouse (it's only a state away), it arrived several days ahead of its original delivery date, which meant that I had an opportunity to install the sucker a lot sooner than I expected.

Nah, man. If I can figure out how to get a refrigerator
to fit in a small kitchen, I can buy the right sized
graphics card. From catplanet.org.

The only surprise I had during installation was that the power connection was on top of the damn card, not on the side, which meant that I had to get creative in terms of making sure the card fit around the case frame. Still, the installation and driver updates went fairly smooth, and the card itself is quieter than the old HD7700 I had in the PC.

***

Over the past week I've had a chance to sit down and try a stable of games with the new card to see what sort of difference it made to the graphics settings.

Now, I don't have a game that's less than two years old (Wildstar and Mass Effect 3 are the newest, from 2014), so the games I have don't really stress a game card like a current gen game (such as, say, Witcher III or Black Desert Online). Still, this card ought to handle both current gen games without much issue.

As for the games I own? let's just say that one game in particular surprised me. A lot.

LOTRO experienced some lag when entering certain areas (such as around Emyn Lun in Mirkwood), as if the game were busy loading data from the LOTRO servers. Given that LOTRO is closing in on its 10 year anniversary next year, I wasn't expecting the graphical lag like I got. But once that initial lag was over, the game ran smoothly.

I've checked online a bit, and discovered that I'm not the only person who has had these issues with LOTRO, and that it might actually be due to the game architecture. I can't really say, but it is definitely the only game that I've experienced this issue with.

But the graphics... Oh, yes. All of the little LOTRO graphics options are selected, and it makes a big difference in the background on the game. Items such as fog are much more realistic now, and background scenery is far more detailed. I can stand on the northern Dwarven outpost in Angmar and look down at Imlad Balcorath in the distance and see all of the details, something I couldn't see without sacrificing framerates.

Not too surprisingly, the game that benefits the most from the new graphics card has been SWTOR. The graphics engine for SWTOR is a bit clunky --even Bioware admits that-- but with a 4 GB card the game finally shines. I can actually set the shadow detail on high and get good framerates; no blobby shadows for me anymore. I really need to get over to my own personal hell, Alderaan, and see how the game holds up now. That used to be the place where my old graphics card went to go cry in a corner, so if it can handle that place, it can handle anything SWTOR throws at it.

Before the new card, those shadows would be blobs.
From mmorpg.com.

As for other games, the weirdest result I got was when loading Star Trek Online. It bitched that I didn't have the current graphics firmware, but then proceeded to load up the highest settings anyway. Something tells me that Cryptic Studios needs to update their graphics card firmware data. Neverwinter and Wildstar looked better, but not overwhelmingly so, as did Age of Conan.

Now, if there was a way for your Guild Wars 2 toons to look more, well, lived in with higher graphics settings and not as pristine as they do...

***

Was it worth it to upgrade?

Well, since I had no real choice, yeah. But if you mean compared to the old card, then yes to that too. I believe that the bigger boost to my system, however, would come from replacing the HDD with an SSD. But that is now an adventure for another time.

Besides, I've got other items to worry about for the next few months, such as university applications.

Oh yay.





*Why change out the power supply when I can find a card that works? Sure, it'd be nice to get a Sapphire Nitro RX470, but not because I had to spend an extra $50-100 on a power supply.

No Graphic Novel for You

The new graphics card is functional, and I'm going to have a post on that shortly. However, I wanted to pass along this little tidbit to Overwatch fans. Apparently the graphic novel set in the Overwatch universe has been scrapped.

From kotaku.com.au. For some reason I couldn't find this article
on the main kotaku.com site. Go figure. And no, I don't know who
this is; it's just the main pic on the article, and the "mobile exoskeleton"
armor looks suspiciously like a Star Trek Next Gen suit
in terms of its... swimsuit look.

This is actually quite an interesting development for Blizzard, as they've been moving heavily into other tie-in sources for a long time now. I'm sure that Blizz hasn't given up on creating a graphic novel for Overwatch, so we'll see how things work out.

...and much fun was had

New graphics card is here, and installation is ongoing at this time.

Thus sayeth Tim the Enchanter.

Here's hoping that there's no disasters. I could use a day without any issues.

Um.... Ouch

I was minding my own business, killing a few mobs on LOTRO in Mirkwood* when my screen went beige.

As in "the entire screen turned into one single beige block and the computer began emitting a BRAAAAAAP sound" sort of beige.

Having seen this sort of thing before I knew what it meant: my PC's video card decided to give up the ghost.

"But I clean the damn thing regularly!" I exclaimed, shaking a fist at the screen.

My wife heard me from the other room, even though she was in the middle of a tight game of Mario Kart online. "What's going on?" she asked.

I recycled the computer in a futile attempt to recover the thing, sighed, and walked over to the tv room. "I think the video card just died."

"Weren't you just talking about..."

"...thinking of upgrading parts of the thing? Yes, but--" I turned and shook my fist in the general direction of my office "--NOT NOW!!"

"So... what are you going to do? What does a replacement cost?"

"About $150 or so. I'm going to see if the motherboard has Intel integrated graphics capability so that we can limp along for a month or two."

***

A few hours --and one abortive attempt to try to use the old NVidia graphics card out of our previous PC**-- later, I managed to expose the previously hidden DVI connection for the Intel HD Graphics 4000 and get the machine back up and running.

I figured it couldn't hurt to try LOTRO, since it's a pretty old MMO, and fired it up.

That was a mistake.

I had to lower the graphics quality to "low" in order to get a fairly smooth (if you want to call it that) experience in Mirkwood. I quickly realized this wasn't going to work, and switched to Civ IV instead.

Civ IV worked better, until the graphics froze, locking the system.

This happened multiple times until I threw up my hands in disgust.

"Well," I told my wife, "you can watch videos, but don't try to tax the system too much, or it'll just die on you. It's something we'll have to deal with for the time being."

***

Alas, gaming is about to be shelved for a while.

Not that I don't have things to write about --I do-- but it would be nice to actually, you know, play something after a long day at work.

Somewhere, Murphy is laughing. I'm sure of it.





*Yes, I finally made it to Mirkwood. I'm kind of aware that the Moria questline will go back and forth for a while, but I don't know how it'll ultimately end up. We'll see, I suppose.

**The machine bitched like you wouldn't believe, so I gave up.

How often can you connect a video game with They Live?

The voice of Captain Anderson in Mass Effect is provided by prolific actor Keith David. For some people, he is also the voice of Goliath in the cartoon Gargoyles. For others, he's found in John Carpenter's films The Thing (Childs) and They Live (Armitage). And still others, he's known for his voice work in Halo, Saints Row, and Call of Duty.

But probably his best known current work in the US is something that's rarely heard beyond our borders.

That's because Keith David is the narrator for commercials for the US Navy.

It may not be well known outside the US, but the US military is an all volunteer force. Since they don't rely upon a draft to staff the military, each branch invests heavily in commercials and outreach.

And that includes television commercials.

So when I hear Captain Anderson in Mass Effect, I have this weird juxtaposition of Mass Effect and the US Navy.

This makes me wonder if people who are used to Jennifer Hale's voice in Mass Effect and other video games have flashbacks when they hear her voice as the SWTOR female trooper.