Getting Killed by Pirates Separatists is Good

I'm not the greatest beta tester in the world.

Oh, I know all about creating and implementing test plans --I worked in software QA for five years-- and I've a nose for finding bugs, so that's not a problem.  It's the lack of time I can devote to a (non-work) project that prevents me from assisting in a beta.

So while everybody else was checking out the MoP and Diablo III betas (although D3 isn't really a beta, since it's a bit late in the cycle for it to be called that), I took advantage of what time I had and tried out The Old Republic instead.

This past weekend was one of the TOR 'free weekends' for people who haven't tried the game out yet.  In anticipation of me wanting to at least get my toe in the water, I'd downloaded the game a couple of weeks ago, so it was a small matter of getting up and running with TOR.*

For me, there were two really big concerns about the game, and none of them had anything to do with gameplay.  The most important of the two was that I barely met the minimum requirements to play the game on my family PC.  The graphics card was better, but the motherboard/CPU/RAM was right at the minimum.  I'd 'played' games before in that situation, and most games at the minimum requirements were barely better than worthless; I'd much rather DL a movie trailer on a dialup line than play a game with the bare minimum requirements.  The second, and it was kind of unique to my situation, was that if my kids found out I was testing out the game over the weekend, I'd be deluged by requests for them to play too.  It's one thing for them to pay LOTRO for free using my account, since I turned off guild/kinship and group/fellowship invites, but everything I'd heard about TOR pointed toward grouping up as more of a requirement than some other MMOs.  Besides, given the 'romance' aspect of TOR, I knew that I'd have to police their activity, and I didn't really feel like dealing with that.

When I made the decision to try TOR out this past weekend, I did so knowing I'd play the game only when the kids were asleep, and that it was entirely possible that the game was unplayable for my machine.  I'd have preferred a better set of circumstances, but you have to roll with what you're dealt.

***

I logged in, started up TOR, and....  had to adjust the graphics settings.

I tweaked several settings down to low, and managed to get a relatively smooth movement experience.  The graphics itself seemed to be okay, but I knew I wasn't getting even an average experience.  Hell, when 4.0.1 dropped on WoW I had to turn off a lot of the 'gee-whiz' water settings, because otherwise my PC would be spending all of its time rendering water while I'm over on, say, Darkshore.**

In WoW, when I used to hang around Dal in Wrath my PC's framerate would drop to the teens on a regular basis.  Org/Stormwind during Cata is better, but the low 20s still ain't that great.  When I made it to the first space station in TOR, I expected things to get busier.  They did, and I could tell my framerate dropped by comparison.  However, there were fewer toons wandering around than were ever in Dal --more NPCs, but fewer real toons-- but what I saw didn't give me a lot of hope that if I hit a very active zone that my PC could cope.

***

For the record, I created a Smuggler.  

Yes, I like Han Solo.

Plus, I didn't feel morally obligated to play it to the straight and narrow that a Jedi toon would have driven me, so my toon could act far more like The Man With No Name than Roy Rogers. 

***

As for the kids, they had no idea I was playing the game at all.  They noticed TOR on the start menu, and I told them that I'd downloaded the game so that if they had a free weekend I could check it out, but I kept mum on the free weekend being THIS weekend.

I knew that if they found out there'd be a "OMG!!!! STAR WARS!!!!!" frenzy, and they'd be hanging on me like piranhas until I relented and let them play.  But compared to WoW (or LOTRO, which they do play), I expected there to be a bit more morally ambiguous choices in TOR.  In WoW, you head to a quest hub and almost every quest is a "rah rah--go good guy--save us!" variety; not all, but most.  LOTRO has the same thing.  Age of Conan is a bit greyer, but the quests are still of the "go out and labor like Hercules" group.  TOR, however, makes you choose the result of the outcome, and rewards you with Dark/Light Side points --or affection points for a companion-- for doing so.  The NPCs are grey --even the ones found in the Intro Zones-- and they have motives where you'd never expect WoW NPCs to go.  If you ever had any opinions whether the Republic is the 'Good Guy' side, the Ord Mandell Intro Zone will disabuse you of that idea.  How else do you describe NPCs who actually are trying to smuggle drugs to keep the populace "stupid enough to stay with the Republic"?  Or NPCs who are really Sith spies?  Or who set up a "competiton" so they can thin the refugee population of excess mouths to feed?  Or NPCs who grab and torture those who they claim are Separatist spies to make them divulge their secrets?

No, TOR delves into greyer area than you see WoW plumb, and it is definitely not for kids who aren't mature enough to handle the questions.

(An aside:  perhaps the Sha is Blizz's answer to Light/Dark Side points.  Given the current state of WoW, however, I'm not sure how that will work out.  From a story perspective, it's kind of hard to simply flip that switch on in Pandaria and ignore it in the rest of Azeroth.)

As for the romance, I didn't exactly progress along anything resembling that in my online time to say how that will shake out, but I'd say that if your kid can't handle real romance very well, I doubt they'd handle an in-game one any better.  Then again, maybe the "not everyone is who they seem" isn't a bad lesson to learn, either.***

***

None of this is news to someone who has played TOR the past few months.

("In other stories, Deathwing has returned to Azeroth!  Film at eleven!")

And if you haven't noticed, some WoW (or ex-WoW) bloggers have left for TOR, grown dissatisfied, and left.  All of this, naturally, has fueled the WoW vs. TOR flame war simmering out there.

That said, I think there needs to be some perspective here.  Should we expect a new MMO to have as much to do as one that has been around and expanded upon for seven years?  Or, perhaps, TOR's focus isn't on luring existing WoW gamers, but bringing in new gamers into MMOs?

What's the startup cost for someone brand new to WoW these days?  Let's say someone comes in, plays the free L1-20 on WoW, and decides to subscribe.  For that person to get up to speed on Cata, they have to plunk down $20 for Vanilla + BC, $30 for Wrath, and $40 for Cata = $90 (not counting discounts via, say, Amazon).  With MoP, that price will go up by another $50 or so to $140 (again, before discounts).  That's a hefty cost for one game, especially if you want to play a Goblin or Worgen.

For TOR, by comparison, the cost is $60 (before discounts).  Sure, you get less, but you've paid less too.  You're not getting a game that has been either in development or in production for almost a decade, but something new.  The polish and variety of gaming experience will always favor the older title, because it has been around longer.

As for the quests, the feel is somewhere between WoW's BC and Wrath questlines.  TOR has one main quest chain running through a zone, with a lot of side quests along the way.  For everyone whom I've seen who complains about the linearity of quests in TOR, I have to ask whether they've actually done the quests in post Cata Old World.  I coined the 'quests-on-rails' term for Cata, not TOR; if there was ever proof that there's too much of a good thing, it's that.  The news that WoW is returning more to a pre-Cata model for MoP is a good thing, in my opinion.

WoW will always win out on the "things to do at max level" argument, because WoW has been tinkered with for so long.  The only way TOR would hope to match that reality would be to hire an army of developers and have them slave away as quickly as they can, and no software company in their right mind will do that for a title that hasn't even proven itself.

Where WoW suffers the most is from a continuity standpoint.  A new MMO such as TOR doesn't have the baggage of a base game + three expansions worth of quests, so continuity isn't going to be a problem.  But to a new gamer, WoW's environment --while vast-- tells a chaotic story.  The timeline jumps around so much that a new gamer will get lost trying to understand the plotline.  Once a new gamer gets the whole idea of what is going on in the Old World, they're whisked back in time to Outland and then Northrend.  And MoP isn't going to do anything to fix the continuity issues, either.

Add to this the design decision by Blizzard to have significant events take place not in-game but in books, and the story gets even more chaotic.

For long time WoW players, this isn't an issue at all.  Really, anyone who began playing in the Wrath days or earlier remembers the original questline progression, and they're on the current timeline without a problem.  But new players didn't have that experience, so they'll be lost.****  By comparision, TOR (or even LOTRO) with their single timeline continuity won't have these problems.

***

One final item of note:  is it so much to have an MMO where the word 'hero' isn't thrown around so much?

I thought I'd escaped that word once I started playing TOR, but even there it follows your toon around like a bad penny.  In WoW, "Heroes!" is used so often that I've taken to calling it the Azerothian equivalent of "Hey you!"

I could have used more of the "....then my son is dead to me" sort of quest endings than the almost-sappy "Oh, you're a hero!", because if you're going to plumb some morally grey areas, you might as well have morally grey responses.




*Well, sort of.  The 'free weekend' download required me to re-download the game again, but in this case I suspect it inserted a file that gave me a temp license and then just rubber-stamped the rest of my installation.  It was more than I expected, but in the end much less painful than if I'd have tried to DL the thing over the weekend.

**I did the same thing when I tried out Rift, too, so maybe that was why I was kind of non-plussed about the game's graphics.

***Also, unlike Age of Conan, it doesn't seem like there's any nudity in the game, so at least that isn't an issue for kids.

****Or, potentially, they won't care, having bought into the belief that the game only really starts at max level.



EtA:  Corrected a few English errors.  My English teachers would not be amused....
EtA:  Apparently I can't add either.  Geesh....

As If We Didn't Have Enough Bad Stereotypes...

...it looks like the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik admitted he trained using Modern Warfare 2, and he played WoW at one point upwards of 16 hours a day.

From CNN: Admitted Norway Killer Breivik says he trained on video games

He's a thoroughly despicable (and likely insane) person, slaughtering 77 people last summer in Norway, and to be linked with him, however vaguely, is enough to make me want to go take a shower.

In Search of Fun

Last weekend, I was on WoW when a guildie posed a question to some others who'd been AFK for a while:

"So, how was SW?"

There was a slight pause, and the response was "It was fun until it wasn't."

"You know," I chimed in, "I've been hearing that a lot lately."

And I have.  This isn't a TOR issue either, because I know of people who left WoW for TOR and haven't looked back.  And if you read the general chat areas of places like Age of Conan you'll find loads of people who delight in bashing WoW and announcing how more awesome their current MMO is.

But still, in this case let's talk about TOR and WoW.  What was it that TOR was missing?  Or, for those who still play TOR and have not looked back, what is it that TOR has?

Lost in the Basin

Sholazar Basin has to be my least favorite zone to level in.

This, in spite of the presence of the Avatar of Freya and the amusement surrounding the "Why is everyone looking at me like I crashed the ship?" banter, and the Frenzyheart vs. Oracles quest line.

I suppose I should be happy about a series of quests that are blatant in that they're the "kill ten rats" variety --that's what you get with Hemet and Co, really-- but all I feel is "please please PLEASE just let me get through this quickly!"  At one point I looked up and checked the number of quests I'd finished in the Basin, saw it was around 15, and blanched.  I had about sixty more quests to go?

I needed a beer.  Badly.

Of all of the zones in Northrend, Sholazar is the one that feels the most 'tacked on'.  The Scourge only start to take center stage once you get through all of Hemet's quests and almost to the end of the Oracle/Frenzyheart quests.  Yes, you could skip around and head straight to Freya, but in the end there's no avoiding the Nesingwary and O/F stuff.

When I made it to Sholazar Basin the first time on Quintalan, I'd already finished up Storm Peaks and most of Icecrown, and I'd paid the (then) 7k gold to get Cold Weather Flying.  However, that did me little good in Sholazar because of the tree cover.  Having returned to it twice now, I've found that it is harder and harder to navigate because you have to fly so low to the ground.  I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but the more obstacles to fly through and constantly change directions with give me headaches.  In much the same way that first-person shooters give me motion sickness, flying through Sholazar --like Un'Goro or Feralas-- is a chore for me.  Then, when you add the numerous 'kill ten rats' quests of Nesingwary and Co, Sholazar makes my head spin.

I thought about other forest zones that don't give me such problems, such as Ashenvale and Felwood*, and two things do stand out:  the density of the foliage and the gaps in the forest.  Ashenvale and Felwood are temperate forests, and the density of the trees at flying level isn't so bad.  Or rather, you can fly at a decent level above ground and see where you're going.  You also get breaks in the forest where you can get your bearings and not feel so closed in.  With Sholazar (and U'G and Feralas), that feeling of claustrophobia can come on strong, along with the disorientation of a forest that looks alike in every direction.

Maybe with some Dramamine Sholazar Basin wouldn't feel so bad.  At the same time, however, it is pretty much a dead-end, storywise.  I'm not sure if that's what's intended, but the impression I get is that Sholazar is the odd-man out of the Northrend story Blizz wanted to tell.  Sure, there's an Avatar there fighting the encroachment of the Scourge, and you have a connection with Un'Goro, but as far as the focus on progressing the story toward the Endgame, Sholazar stands apart.  It takes you nowhere.  Normally I wouldn't mind, given that it expands the overall feel of the game world, but given that the three expansions after Vanilla got away from the "sandbox" type of game, Sholazar just feels out of step from the rest of the design goals for Azeroth.


*I would include the Ghostlands too, but you can't fly there.  Yet.

A Few Random Monday-ish Thoughts

It's no secret that I have a stable of Paladins.  Soul plays tanks, Rades (Orcish Army Knife) likes Hunters, and Vidyala (from Manalicious) likes Draenei.

What makes people stick with one race or toon or class over another, while others are confirmed Altoholics?

I can honestly say that I got into playing Paladins because of their similarities to D&D's Clerics.  I play Clerics --first because we needed a healer and then by choice-- and so naturally the first class I'd try out was the Priest, thinking it was a WoW version of a Cleric.

It took about 15 minutes before I discovered how wrong I was, and after some encouragement from Soul, I switched to the Paladin.

As for others, I can't say.  Maybe it's the appeal of bashing someone in the face, controlling the fight, or the lore of a specific race, but some folks latch on to something and don't let it go.

But Altoholics....

I watch my son play LOTRO, and I swear every time I turn around he's creating a new character.  He likes to play Hobbits, but I don't think he could settle on a single character even if his life depended on it.

Oh well.  Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, right?

***

As I've been working through Alliance-side Loremaster on Tomakan, I've cruised through Grizzly Hills.  In a post-Cata world, this, more than anything else, sticks out like a sore thumb.

"Have you been bloody bitten??!!" the Alliance scout shrieks as we're fleeing to safety.  The fear and loathing of the Worgen in that zone is just as palpable as you'll find in pre-Cata Silverpine Forest and Duskwood, and they are so far out of the reality of Worgen as Alliance that it's laughable.

Can you imagine that Alliance scout asking that of a Worgen toon?

"Um, well....  Now that you mention it, yeah!!  But I got better...."

***

I encountered a newbie in Zul'Drak this past weekend.  I'd forgotten how fresh everything seemed at that stage of the game, but even then, this newbie was in a race to 85.  I got the impression that he was jumping as quickly as he could from zone to zone, following some manual or add-on, which put a damper on my reverie, but merely finding a newbie these days is an achievement when you're surrounded by jaded veterans at max level.

I think I need to get out and hang around in the starter zones a bit more often these days...

The Blogger as Revolutionary

Count de Monet:  It is said that the people are revolting.
King Louis XVI:  You said it! They stink on ice!
--From History of the World Part I


I have a mid-40s Dwarf Paladin over on the Moonrunner (US) server that dates from the pre-Real ID days.  Back then, myself and a few other WoW bloggers created a social guild to connect in-game.  As Real ID and cross server grouping has replaced the need to hook up on the same server, the guild has fallen into disuse.  That said, every couple of weeks I login to Balthan to get in some low level BG action on a Ret Pally.

Well, the other day I logged in and was greeted by the following pop-up:

Now, let's set something straight:  I know that the GM isn't inactive; he's Rades of Orcish Army Knife.

Before you ask, yes, he has an Alliance toon.  And a female Draenei Hunter, no less.  (So much for that Horde bias, right?)

Considering that I know Rades hasn't exactly bolted for greener pastures, I got in touch with him about this little pop-up.  Naturally, he thought it funny that it appeared, and he wanted to see what would happen if I tried to dethrone him.  I wasn't so sure about how this would work out, since I was the only person from the guild to login for the past 4+ months, and if there were a vote, I wasn't sure how that'd work out with nobody else to cast a ballot.  Hell, given the fact that we'd never identified which toon belonged to which blogger, I had no idea who was even still around to assist.

Well, I need not have worried.

 

And that was how I ousted Rades in a bloodless coup, providing him with endless fodder for blog posts as the exiled GM of Puggers Anonymous.  (Well, it's not really that bad; I kept him on as an officer.  You know the quote: keep your friends close and your enemies closer....)

Hmm, maybe I should create a Fabulor toon on Moonrunner before Rades decides to make one there....

 

 

That Elusive New Shiny

(Note:  I kind of wrote this straight without editing, and I decided to post it as-is.  If it meanders, well, you know where that came from.)

I was on Tomakan, working my way through Un’Goro Crater, when a guildie posed me a question.

“What do you think of the revamped zones?”

“I’m kind of torn,” I replied.  “I don’t like the quests-on-rails, but in some zones the stories are compelling:  Stonetalon on both sides, Southern Barrens on both sides.  They needed to do the quests-on-rails format to tell a story, especially with the phasing involved.  However, for a sandbox it doesn’t work so well.”

I couldn’t get those comments out of my head while I took a break and got catapulted into a WSG run.  While I’m not the biggest WSG fan, I still preferred that WSG game to the prospect of going back to Northrend and finishing up the zones I’d left behind.  Why was that, I asked myself.  Leveling a Warlock via BGs in Cata is an exercise in masochism, yet that was preferable to finishing up Zul’Drak for the fourth or fifth time.

The easiest answer to that is because the story never changes.  Even with phasing, we know this tale because we’ve played it before.  The outcomes are always the same, every time you play.  You may have an impact on the game world, but your choices don’t matter.  The few times you do have a true choice –to either kill or release the harpy leader in Hyjal, for example—it’s not a game impacting decision.  It’s a lot like the jokes that would get thrown around in the Culling of Stratholme instance about simply letting Arthas die:  everyone knows that the point of the instance is to keep him alive, in spite of our personal preferences, so we’ll simply just tag along in the knowledge that this really isn’t our story, but Blizzard’s.

This understanding about the game world is the basis for how Blizzard gets away with having major plot threads performed off-stage in books, rather than in the world itself.  I’ve found even in my own writing that it is easier to have certain major events occur off-stage and then have the characters react to that instead of the more arduous task of actually putting the events down on paper.  I can only imagine that this difficulty is magnified when you have to have people “act” in an MMO:  you’d have to design the quests, the NPC activity, the words, the artwork, and all sorts of other stuff associated in setting up a scene vs. paying an author $5k-$10k-$20k to write a book.  To a finance department, that’s a no-brainer.

And yet, I can’t help but wonder if a good portion of the reason why the lower level zones are so consistently empty is because we really don’t have an impact on the story.  Those zones are reduced to being leveling fodder for people hunting for a transmog piece of gear or are populated with gold farmers trying to crank out as much raw materials as they can.  Because we can’t change the story we’re forced to relive the events of the doomed Alliance commander in Southern Barrens where he is effectively betrayed by elements of his own side who want a scorched earth policy toward the Horde.  We can’t even raise a red flag to the Horde commander in Ashenvale that there might be a demon hiding in his midst until such activity draws the ire of Garrosh.  (Old Garrosh despises demons far more than the Alliance, and I have to give him credit for that.)  Have we seen this play before?  You bet we have.  And like a cursed sailor on the Flying Dutchman, we’re forced to relive these events every time we quest in a particular zone.

Perhaps that’s what appeals to me in BGs:  the outcome is uncertain, and you can have an impact on the game.  Sure, you can be saddled with a lot of people who know nothing about how to play AV, but so can the other side.  Plenty of real battles were fought when one side was hopelessly green or outnumbered, and yet you can never say for certain what will happen in the end once the troops are committed.  (The Battle of Marathon or the Siege of Rhodes in 1480 both come to mind.)

In a game designed like WoW, perhaps this is the best we can come to an uncertain outcome where our decisions actually matter.  Sure, there’s raiding, and I’ve heard and seen the toll that smashing your collective head against the impregnable wall of an end boss can put on a person and a guild.  Raiding is, by nature, a hard thing to accomplish, and once you succeed all of that effort will have been worth it.  However, the story will never change no matter how many times we down that boss.  Once the boss is a photo op lying on the ground, we know how things will go.  The NPC reactions are always the same.

This might be an unintended side-effect of the LFR tool:  as more people can easily see end content, the clamor for the new shiny comes louder and quicker.  While some folks love to chase hard modes (or even normal modes now) others who are conditioned by console gaming say “Okay, I’ve beaten the game.  Now what?”  This isn’t because people are greedy, it’s just that they’re conditioned to play the game a certain way, and if that goal is reached more quickly, they’re at a loss as to what to do.

***

MMOs –even those that aren’t sandbox types-- are by nature big worlds with lots of options.  Soul and I have posted that very thing on occasion when the “I’m bored!” crowd kicks it into high gear.  If you’re bored with 5-mans, try BGs.  If you are looking for something off the beaten track, try a naked dungeon challenge like what Rades advocated.  Or maybe how about an old-time flashback and organize a Paladin vs. Shaman throwdown? 

However, it needs to be said that people have different motivations when playing an MMO such as WoW, and when that motivation is unfilled, people will move on in search of that magic.  But what is that magic that people are chasing?

Everyone is different.  People play games for different reasons.  Some love a good story; some love the thrill of having beaten the game; some go for the competition of PvP; some love to collect, and some just live to role play.  There are as many different motivations to playing an MMO as there are options inside a game.  That elusive magic that a game can bring into your soul is a chameleon; each player sees a different siren leading them onward.

Perhaps the restlessness we see in the MMO world today is a reflection of chameleon like nature of our pursuit of the magic.  People remember that moment, that ‘oh wow’ moment, and they wish to recapture it.  For some, the new shiny holds promise, and we shouldn’t be surprised when people unsub/resub in pursuit of that new shiny.  This same group will migrate to and from MMOs, testing the latest and greatest, yet remembering their first.

I still play ‘old’ games such as Civ and Master of Orion, because the magic is still there.  I remember that thrill when I finally beat Civ I on King level, a feat I’ve never repeated.  My kids will see the clunky graphics and primitive sounds of MOO and laugh, but I know that they’ll remember Civ IV the same way I remember Civ I.  Or how I remember when I finally started playing WoW.