Last week I had an evening to myself, so I logged in as Tomakan to get in some BGs.
The first couple of runs were okay, but when I got Arathi Basin, I ported in and was greeted by groans.
"What?" I asked in BG chat. I may not be the best BG player out there, but I'm certainly not that bad.
"The Mal'Gannis crew is here," one of my team replied.
I took a look at the Horde side's lineup and saw the telltale server name Mal'Gannis five times. "Oh... crap."
"Maybe we should give up now," another Alliance player suggested.
"Hell no," a Rogue replied. "We'll beat those assholes!"
Having met the Mal'Gannis Five before, I had my doubts. They were all members of the same guild, and at the very least they were kitted out with a full set of Cataclysmic gear.* That indicated they either ran Rateds or 5s in Arenas, and they were all used to working with each other. Compare that with a traditional pugged BG, and the differences were obvious.
In this particular AB run, they were a roving group of five and smashed everyone in their way.
The lopsided loss took its toll on a few players. "Alliance always sucks!" said one enlightened soul.
"Come on," I replied. "We're a bunch of puggers up against a Rated team. You don't think that has an impact?"
"Alliance sucks!"
I rolled my eyes. When confronted with such logic, there's not much you can do.
Still, that does bring up the question what a Rated or 5s group was doing in a traditional pug, anyway. I'd put it up to a "blowing off steam" or "taking a break", except that they've been staples of the random BGs for the past month. Well, sort of random, anyway: you'll find them in the lower sized BGs for the most part, where they can have a larger impact on the outcome (WSG, BoG, TP, AB, and EotS). The advantages of a well-oiled machine like what they have over a bunch of puggers ought to be obvious; it would take a massive screw-up on the rest of their side to lose. Or having a comparable Rated team on the Alliance side.
From a game standpoint, a Rated team has just as much right to run a regular BG pug as the next group, but I can't help but think of the similarities between that and an event that happened several years ago.
My son was playing baseball in an instructional league for six and seven year olds. Each team was allowed a maximum of two eight year olds per team, because of the instructional nature of the league. If you've ever seen six and seven year olds play, you know that you've got the wide spectrum of abilities and attention spans assembled out there on the field. I used to pull my hair out watching my son looking all over the place rather than at the batter; on more than one occasion the ball would be hit toward him and it scooted right on by before he realized what was happening.
In one particular game, however, we arrived and I noticed several of our parents looking worried over by the sidelines. I shooed my son over to where the coaches were and joined the group. They'd been watching the other team warm up, and something wasn't right. "They're acting way too mature for six and seven year olds," one mom told me. Sure enough, that team had gotten the balls out and were warming up without any supervision whatsoever, and their accuracy was almost frightening.
Once the game began, it was clear there was a mismatch.
Their pitcher was throwing hard --and I do mean hard-- and mowed down our players with three consecutive strike-outs. They came up to the plate, and started killing the ball everywhere. Before the first inning was over, the score was 6-0. I was annoyed, but I couldn't say much; I mean, the other team was just that good. It was like watching a major league team play against a college team.
When one of our coaches came back to the dugout, however, he was mad. He'd been talking to all of the other teams' kids when he was out at second base as an additional umpire, and it turned out that the other team was playing with a stacked deck: all of the kids were eight year olds. Additionally, that team had a game the next day, in an eight and nine year old league.
They were using our team as batting practice.
As you can surmise, the game was called after three innings due to runs. Our coach put in a protest to the league about the other team, and we found out later that several other teams had done the same thing. Nevertheless, the damage had been done. It's kind of hard to explain to a seven year old that the ass-kicking they just received didn't count because the other team cheated, because they'd just been beaten out on the field.
Comparatively speaking, what that baseball team did was cheating, while a Rated team running regular BG pugs isn't. However, the mismatch is very real, and can be very disheartening to someone learning to play BGs. Spend an entertaining afternoon being corpse camped in WSG and tell me how you feel that makes you a better player. Here's a hint: it doesn't. When you respawn, get buffed, and then you get stun-stun-stunned to death, you have almost no chance at actually learning to play. Instead, you'll probably decide to not play PvP.
The hardcore EVE types will argue that it's all for the better to separate the wheat from the chaff, but there's a drawback to such behavior. You feed into the stereotype that PvPers are all assholes who hang out with ninja looters and trade chat nutjobs. "L2P noob!" doesn't help the community, it harms the community by making it shrink.
Am I arguing for a self banning of rated teams from regular BGs? It is tempting, but I believe what's needed here is restraint. Sure, you can wipe the floor of the WW with the other team's butts, but there's no need to go corpse camping. It isn't necessary to hold onto that last flag instead of capping just so you can farm honorable kills. The big rule ought to be "Don't be a jerk."
After all, karma can be a real bitch.
A short update: In between the time I wrote this and posted it, I spent a half an hour in WoW. I got into WSG, and discovered the full Mal'Gannis Rated team on the other side. What happened? After the first flag capture, they put us on farm. Players began leaving like rats fleeing a sinking ship. After another five minutes of it, even I gave up and took the debuff rather than get killed another dozen times. Soloing the Pit of Saron seemed like a better deal.
*Remember, the Armory is your friend. And when that doesn't work, create a toon on the server, go to the Hall of Legends, and inspect them that way. Know thy enemy.
EtA: Corrected a couple of grammar errors in the baseball story.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Friday, May 4, 2012
Just D... Wait, what do you mean that line's taken?
This is written for the Newbie Blogger Initiative, which is going on throughout May 2012. You can find more info at http://nbihq.freeforums.org.
Trademarks aside, that's the best advice I can give a new blogger.
Just go ahead and write. Don't be afraid.
Well, be smart. Don't write things that'll get you in trouble at work, or with your family, or with your friends. If you want guild drama, the easiest thing to do is start posting about the scuttlebutt in your guild and what you think of it all. If you wonder whether something you're writing is going to cause trouble, skip it and come back to it later.
If, however, you really don't care what people think and you've got the intestinal fortitude to back it up, then damn the torpedoes!
I realize that people will say to write what you know, and yes, that does let a new blogger start out on familiar ground. But for my money, the act of writing itself is more important. You're only going to get better as a blogger and a writer if you challenge yourself, by pushing what you can do. When I look back at my initial columns when writing PC, I cringe. I had no idea how little I knew about WoW, and what I thought then was decent writing now seems really klunky and pretentious. Do I wish I'd been a better writer back then? Sure. But the thing is, the only way I really did improve was to work at it: I played more, learned more about the game, and I wrote.
When you write, a funny thing happens. You gain perspective. You analyze yourself and what you believe. You realize that not everyone will agree with you. Hell, you also realize that what you thought was pretty good might be utter crap to another person. Or worse, boring as sin.
Don't go into this because you want to be an awesome! cool! popular! blogger, because that's lightning in a bottle. You can't chase fame without sacrificing yourself in the process. Instead, blog because you want to, and because you have words that want to come out. When you blog like that, you're exposing more of yourself than if you were chasing fame, but in that risk lies the reward.
A blog is a strange thing. It's composed of your writing, and it can live indefinitely if you want it to. It doesn't need readers to survive. What it does need is a blogger.
Don't worry about readers. Don't worry if it seems you're shouting into the wind. Concern yourself with what you can control, and that's the content.
Write.
Trademarks aside, that's the best advice I can give a new blogger.
Just go ahead and write. Don't be afraid.
Well, be smart. Don't write things that'll get you in trouble at work, or with your family, or with your friends. If you want guild drama, the easiest thing to do is start posting about the scuttlebutt in your guild and what you think of it all. If you wonder whether something you're writing is going to cause trouble, skip it and come back to it later.
If, however, you really don't care what people think and you've got the intestinal fortitude to back it up, then damn the torpedoes!
I realize that people will say to write what you know, and yes, that does let a new blogger start out on familiar ground. But for my money, the act of writing itself is more important. You're only going to get better as a blogger and a writer if you challenge yourself, by pushing what you can do. When I look back at my initial columns when writing PC, I cringe. I had no idea how little I knew about WoW, and what I thought then was decent writing now seems really klunky and pretentious. Do I wish I'd been a better writer back then? Sure. But the thing is, the only way I really did improve was to work at it: I played more, learned more about the game, and I wrote.
When you write, a funny thing happens. You gain perspective. You analyze yourself and what you believe. You realize that not everyone will agree with you. Hell, you also realize that what you thought was pretty good might be utter crap to another person. Or worse, boring as sin.
Don't go into this because you want to be an awesome! cool! popular! blogger, because that's lightning in a bottle. You can't chase fame without sacrificing yourself in the process. Instead, blog because you want to, and because you have words that want to come out. When you blog like that, you're exposing more of yourself than if you were chasing fame, but in that risk lies the reward.
A blog is a strange thing. It's composed of your writing, and it can live indefinitely if you want it to. It doesn't need readers to survive. What it does need is a blogger.
Don't worry about readers. Don't worry if it seems you're shouting into the wind. Concern yourself with what you can control, and that's the content.
Write.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
PC Joins the Newbie Blogger Initiative
I found out about this initiative from Spinks of Welcome to Spinksville!, and I can't think of a better way to help bring new blood into the blogging hobby.
This initiative is being run by Syp of Biobreak, and there's a board nbihq.freeforums.org where bloggers --both old and new-- can sign up and participate. The initiative is slated to run over the month of May, and both PC and many other bloggers will be posting encouragement and advice on blogging on their own blogs.
See you around!
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Redbeard Boards the Twisted Nether Blogcast
Yes, you read that right.
EtA: For people overseas, the time is 3 AM Sunday GMT. London is 4 AM Sunday,
while Melbourne is 1 PM Sunday.
I will be a guest on this Saturday's episode of the Twisted Nether Blogcast at 8 PM PST (11 PM EST). Stop on by and enjoy the show!
(Hopefully, Hydra and Fimlys will make me sound better than I really am.)
To listen to the live stream, go to twistednether.net/live and join in the chat room. See you there!
EtA: For people overseas, the time is 3 AM Sunday GMT. London is 4 AM Sunday,
while Melbourne is 1 PM Sunday.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
A Few Other Random TOR Thoughts
When I started playing TOR last Thursday night, I didn't finish my first quest before I started getting a massive headache.
"Oh crap," I thought. "You've got to be kidding me."
I've mentioned before in some other posts that I get headaches and disorientation when I play first person shooters. I've had this problem dating back to the original Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, when the old conflict between what my eyes are seeing versus what my inner ear is telling my brain first reared its ugly head. For a long time I assumed that MMOs would cause me trouble as well, but once I started playing WoW I discovered that the only location that I had problems was in Shadowfang Keep, with it's tight twists and turns causing the camera to constantly zoom in and out. Rift, LOTRO, and AoC didn't cause me any trouble at all, so I didn't expect anything different from TOR.
I couldn't see anything obvious in what the game was doing that would cause me issues, so I decided to simply call it a night and go and sleep it off. The next morning, however, I didn't have any trouble with the game at all. I chalked it up to sinuses and kept playing without incident.
Still, if first person shooters give you problems, go slow on TOR before you're comfortable enough with pressing onward.
Another thing happened in those first five minutes in addition to the headache: I was invited to join a group.
I'm used to the occasional random grouping request from other MMOs, but usually you get your feet wet before you group up with someone. With TOR, however, the group requests came very frequently throughout my free period. I really haven't played enough to get a good feel for the game community, but at first glance TOR seems to foster a community that works together, which is a bit different than that found in WoW or LOTRO. AoC does encourage grouping because the quest lines have a sizable number of multi-group quests, but TOR appears to have this driven organically as opposed to being imposed artificially.
Now, the higher you level, that scenario might change, but this is based on the first 11-12 levels or so.
Like most MMOs, TOR has multi-player quests.*
What I found interesting was where those multi-player quests --called Heroic Quests-- lay in the spectrum on MMOs.
In one end you have the group quests in Age of Conan, which are impossible to solo at level. In fact, the L20-ish group quests for AoC are only solo-able once you get into the upper L40s. Yes, that's a 15-20 level difference, and believe me the difference is real.
Somewhere in the middle you'll find the leftover WoW group quests and the LOTRO group quests, where the group quest difficulty can vary from quest to quest. Some of Icecrown's quests you can solo with raid gear at level, but others are too difficult to achieve otherwise. As a rule of thumb, a L10 difference (at low level) or an L5 difference (at Wrath level and beyond) is sufficient for soloing.
TOR, on the other hand, had 2-player group quests in Ord Mandell that were doable only a level or two higher than the intended level, and if you take along a companion there's no trouble at all. My suspicion is that this will scale in difficulty the higher up in level you go, but I didn't get far enough into the story to find out.
Nevertheless, to an experienced MMO player the 2-man group quests in TOR are doable at level with a companion. Just make sure your companion stays upright, and don't merely try to out-DPS the enemy.
The toon creation options are much greater than that in WoW or LOTRO, but most of the toons I saw had a similar body build.
So what did I do? Create Redbeard, of course.
I didn't go whole hog and make my Smuggler obese, but he is definitely on the chunky side. He's also tall (like the Ghost of Redbeard from the Scooby-Doo episode, not me), and he's got that full red hair and a beard. If I tried to do that in WoW, the best I could come up with would be a Dwarf; not exactly what I had in mind, you know.
Still, my Smuggler really did stand out from the crowd.
I didn't get the try the female creation tools, but I've seen articles by Spinks on them already, so they sound a bit like what you find in Age of Conan. Not perfect, but better than WoW or LOTRO.
So, if in case you were wondering, I did try something different than the most common models out there.
*Yes, WoW still has some group quests around, mainly confined to the BC and Wrath zones. In Icecrown, for example, you can't complete the Loremaster achievement there by soloing as an L80 with quest greens/blues; there are too many group quests standing in your way. When I finished that achievement on Quintalan back in Wrath, he needed T9 gear and the Quel'Delar quest chain to solo some of those group quests.
"Oh crap," I thought. "You've got to be kidding me."
I've mentioned before in some other posts that I get headaches and disorientation when I play first person shooters. I've had this problem dating back to the original Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, when the old conflict between what my eyes are seeing versus what my inner ear is telling my brain first reared its ugly head. For a long time I assumed that MMOs would cause me trouble as well, but once I started playing WoW I discovered that the only location that I had problems was in Shadowfang Keep, with it's tight twists and turns causing the camera to constantly zoom in and out. Rift, LOTRO, and AoC didn't cause me any trouble at all, so I didn't expect anything different from TOR.
I couldn't see anything obvious in what the game was doing that would cause me issues, so I decided to simply call it a night and go and sleep it off. The next morning, however, I didn't have any trouble with the game at all. I chalked it up to sinuses and kept playing without incident.
Still, if first person shooters give you problems, go slow on TOR before you're comfortable enough with pressing onward.
***
Another thing happened in those first five minutes in addition to the headache: I was invited to join a group.
I'm used to the occasional random grouping request from other MMOs, but usually you get your feet wet before you group up with someone. With TOR, however, the group requests came very frequently throughout my free period. I really haven't played enough to get a good feel for the game community, but at first glance TOR seems to foster a community that works together, which is a bit different than that found in WoW or LOTRO. AoC does encourage grouping because the quest lines have a sizable number of multi-group quests, but TOR appears to have this driven organically as opposed to being imposed artificially.
Now, the higher you level, that scenario might change, but this is based on the first 11-12 levels or so.
***
Like most MMOs, TOR has multi-player quests.*
What I found interesting was where those multi-player quests --called Heroic Quests-- lay in the spectrum on MMOs.
In one end you have the group quests in Age of Conan, which are impossible to solo at level. In fact, the L20-ish group quests for AoC are only solo-able once you get into the upper L40s. Yes, that's a 15-20 level difference, and believe me the difference is real.
Somewhere in the middle you'll find the leftover WoW group quests and the LOTRO group quests, where the group quest difficulty can vary from quest to quest. Some of Icecrown's quests you can solo with raid gear at level, but others are too difficult to achieve otherwise. As a rule of thumb, a L10 difference (at low level) or an L5 difference (at Wrath level and beyond) is sufficient for soloing.
TOR, on the other hand, had 2-player group quests in Ord Mandell that were doable only a level or two higher than the intended level, and if you take along a companion there's no trouble at all. My suspicion is that this will scale in difficulty the higher up in level you go, but I didn't get far enough into the story to find out.
Nevertheless, to an experienced MMO player the 2-man group quests in TOR are doable at level with a companion. Just make sure your companion stays upright, and don't merely try to out-DPS the enemy.
***
The toon creation options are much greater than that in WoW or LOTRO, but most of the toons I saw had a similar body build.
So what did I do? Create Redbeard, of course.
I didn't go whole hog and make my Smuggler obese, but he is definitely on the chunky side. He's also tall (like the Ghost of Redbeard from the Scooby-Doo episode, not me), and he's got that full red hair and a beard. If I tried to do that in WoW, the best I could come up with would be a Dwarf; not exactly what I had in mind, you know.
Still, my Smuggler really did stand out from the crowd.
I didn't get the try the female creation tools, but I've seen articles by Spinks on them already, so they sound a bit like what you find in Age of Conan. Not perfect, but better than WoW or LOTRO.
So, if in case you were wondering, I did try something different than the most common models out there.
*Yes, WoW still has some group quests around, mainly confined to the BC and Wrath zones. In Icecrown, for example, you can't complete the Loremaster achievement there by soloing as an L80 with quest greens/blues; there are too many group quests standing in your way. When I finished that achievement on Quintalan back in Wrath, he needed T9 gear and the Quel'Delar quest chain to solo some of those group quests.
Monday, April 23, 2012
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.
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....
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....
Thursday, April 19, 2012
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.
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.
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