F2Pocalypse 2013

So let me get this straight. In the news in the last few days:

LotRO added a patch with Hobbit Presents, a new gambling-style lockbox that they spam daily at players. Why bother with giving lockboxes a chance to drop from a monster? Just shovel them at players and try to rake in the cash. And LotRO added a literal in-game store shopping mall in Bree.

SWTOR’s new patch supposedly adds nothing but store items.

And Rift today announced that it’s going Free To Play. But it will be fair with no tricks or traps–they promise. Bill Fisher says the stigma of F2P is going away, but if it is, then why do they have to make that promise in the first place?

This is probably the main reason that Hartsman left Trion. It’s because the man is a god of integrity, like I always said. He’s really cute too. Can I say that without being reverse-sexist? I’m not sure, but I did. This is the way of the kitty.

So. I said I’d never blog about LotRO again, but since I quit the game, I feel like I can make an exception to say that I hope it dies in a fire. I hope they pull the license. I hope it shuts down ASAP so I never have to hear about it again.

My elves have diminished, abandoning the world to the greed of men. And women, in this case.

I made my goodbye post. I updated my LotRO Interface page to say that I will no longer be supporting those 14k downloads. I’m leaving my LotRO boxing guide up on my blog. It’s top post today, I think from some press it got in the forums.

Boxing is kind of a rebellious activity. It’s also a way for players to get as much from F2P as possible without paying. It’s okay with me.

I’ve almost condemned Neverwinter also. I’m still on the fence. I was reading the 1500+ post F2P-complaint thread in the forums until the mods closed it down and ejected it with no explanation. I heard about the Orwellian world chat spam whenever someone wins the lottery. I heard about the high prices for basic things. The double-diamond earning weekends or whatever.

To be fair, I don’t just assume the whiners are right. Neverwinter might be the most smokin’ deal going in an MMO right now. Once you wade through all of the currency exchange rates and calculate out a monthly estimate of what you mind need–it might well be fair. (A degree in accounting or a genius IQ is useful for playing a F2P game.)

F2P is just not a game I want to play. I want immersion, not a meta shopping experience where I buy things for my characters like they are barbie dolls. F2P is a symptom of the sickness that is pervasive in American culture.

So the kitty is now left with WoW, Guild Wars 2, Skyrim, and Dragon Age 2. Guild Wars 2 is double-dipping, but it’s non-obtrusive. I haven’t really needed the store yet. The store will move forward, though. The corruption might be inevitable.

On a positive note, I’m working on a fun new comic strip titled “The Forsaken Inn Of Unplayable Races”. It’s a place where races go when they aren’t wanted in an MMO. It’s cute. I’ll have it posted soon. A new strip is needed in the yonder sidebar to replace the one about SWTOR.

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TAGN on Rift F2P

Rockstar Keeps Pushing The Male Chauvinist Approach

So I just watched the end of the Pacers-Knicks playoff game (U.S. Basketball), and I had to roll my eyes at the commercials: robot models on high heels selling a car (Kia), and young perfect girls in underwear fondling a new phallic player by Radio Shack.

The robot girls can kick ass though. Is that any better, or just more titillation for a male audience? Whatever. But then I read the gaming news and noticed Rockstar Games has gone too far. I have to blog this.

These are video games. Serious bizness.

Brett Slabaugh posted an article for Escapist yesterday discussing a Skyrim-like character development for the three protagonists in Grand Theft Auto 5. A sort of real RPG driver game. Great.

But wait.

None of new GTA main characters are women. All of Rockstar’s three new GTA protagonists are male. Again they stick to their formula, without deviation. How is that even possible? I’m trying to imagine a fictitious planning meeting:

Producer: How can we be more successful with GTA5?

Dev#1:In the past, we’ve always had to pick one protagonist, which means only a slice of possible demographic appeal. I say we do three characters in GTA5 instead of just one. Maybe a white collar guy. A southern crazy drug dealer guy. Of course, a black gang-banger guy. That way, there is something for almost everyone.

Producer: What about a woman?

Dev#1: Haha! Good one, boss. What about the sex scenes? Too complicated. Who wants to bother with actual romance, and boyfriends? Or worse yet, are we going to let a woman character screw and use prostitutes like our dudes?

Producer: You’re right. I was joking. So a latino?

Dev#1: It might work in the U.S., but we’ve crunched the numbers and believe that two white guys from opposite ends of the spectrum would be statistically better, worldwide. The white guy is the standard. Everyone is generally comfortable with it.

Producer: What about you, dev #2? Thoughts?

Dev#2: More strippers and prostitutes. More helicopters. Maybe some crazy alien helicopters. The Saint’s Row devs are getting too cocky.

Producer: Sounds balling, mate. Let’s do it.

If you’re reaching for the close tab right now, trying watching this video and notice the representations of women, including a brilliant line (sic) “Nice new tits, by the way.” (3:16) This approach to women is purposefully how they are trying to sell games at this point, and at this point it may have gone out of bounds, in my opinion.

I’m not a prude. I actually love Jaime Murray’s line in Dexter season 2: “Pardon my tits.” The line is supposed to make her seem sleazy, a skank that sleeps around. Later she is called in a derogatory way “Miss Pardon-My-Tits”.

I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t fall for that double-standard. I liked the nipple confidence. I also think I can say tits on my blog. If I can’t, someone let me know. I will be pissed off, but willing to replace them with kittens.

I’ve been reading the Guild Wars 2 forums for three weeks and finally realized something super-important: when people say “kitten”, that’s the GW2 forum profanity filter kicking in. For the past days I’ve been like, what? Kitten must be a new MMO term. What is it? What’s a “kitten build”? How is changing that skill going to “kitten” your build?

I was so confused, but it turned out to be a word puzzle. Groovy. Guild Wars 2 players seem to use a lot of bad words.

Back on topic, Brett Slabaugh concludes his Escapist article by saying: “Between these new details and what we already know, Grand Theft Auto V is shaping up to be Rockstar’s most ambitious project yet. It also makes me that much more disappointed that the main story can’t be played through in three-player co-op, though Rockstar has its reasons.”

He’s disappointed that he can’t play three-player co-operative mode? Really? Boo hoo, do you want me to kiss that for you? Of course you do, so I’ll see you in GTA5. I’ll be playing NPC stripper #5, standing next to some pole in a closed room 1200 pixels square, gyrating for forty hours straight instead of out on the streets playing like I’m all gangster.

Saint’s Row 4 is scheduled to release in August, but I doubt that I will ever play it. I’m still working on 3, and 2 is still my favorite, like a lot of players. That game series is also going in an unfortunate direction, leaving Mafia as the classiest driver/gangster franchise, with Mafia 3 in development, thankfully.

“Moving forward to 2013, the world of video games is bereft of realistic criminal capers. It’s widely rumoured that Mafia 3 is already in development for next-gen consoles, although details remain unknown. Regardless, this doesn’t stop it from being one of my most anticipated games, whether it’s in development or not.” – Mafia3Game

Guild Wars 2 Writing And Immersion: Superb

I’ve played Guild Wars 2 for one week now, and I continue to be impressed every day. I’ve played my usual, same-old MMO for so long that I’d forgotten how real fun felt.

Today I went on a guided history tour in the human capital city (Divinity’s Reach.) I took the opportunity to get my “walk” hotkey set up and learned some things about Kryta political history.

I also realized that the Asian looks in the character creator are explained by Cantha, which was a GW1 expansion after I quit playing it. Kryta is a melting pot situation.

I really, really like the character naming setup in GW2. You’re allowed multiple names with spaces. So if “Robert” is taken, you can try “Sir Robert” or “Robert Ross” or “Sir Robert Of Beartown”. This scheme is a boon for roleplaying.

Maybe you want to be a monk, so you’ll want “Brother Robert” or something. The hard part is trying to determine whether the honorific “Sir” is even appropriate, or if it’s supposed to be “Ser”, or if you should be a “Chief Engineer” or “Mistress” depending on your race, or just skip the whole thing because it’s too pretentious and isn’t you.

I’m so impressed by the game writing. GW2 delivers a starting story that is personal, and reasons to defend that beseiged city, explained in a way that is believable. You get a feeling that things are at stake, at risk.

Other games I’ve posted about lately (i.e. Secret World and Neverwinter) failed to provide you with a friend in the game, a “Smiling Jack”, someone to make you feel welcome and give you a connection. Some of the GW2 races start you right off with selecting a friend or sibling that will play a part in your story.

Human characters also select a deity. Unlike Neverwinter, which (iirc from beta, it may be different or changed) only describes the deities and lets you pick one, the GW2 writing makes it personal through the writing.

For example: “Melandru … can be found in every harvest and every flower. She smiles upon those, like me, who have an affinity for animals. I am a follower of Melandru.” Personal. This works.

I’m not far into the personal story plots, but so far with two races, I’ve noticed a classic pattern of writing good fiction, as described and recommended by Jack Bickham et. al.:

• Hero has a goal.
• Hero fails to achieve goal, suffering a setback.
• Hero has to come up with another plan.
• Another setback; the stakes get higher and higher.

My new character, Shar Katzdottir, is a half-Norn, a bastard daughter of a Norn fortune-teller who spread her stockinged cards during hard times for a wealthy Elonian. Shar killed another client who made her mother disappear. She fled the city and lived in the Kryta wild for a time, learning intuitively the ways of her Norn heritage and communing with the cats as a Ranger.

When Shar dared return to the city out of loneliness, she lived on the streets until she befriended Quinn, who gave her a bed to sleep in. “This is her story” as the GW2 writing says. This is good writing with a brilliant economy of style. I’m looking forward to more.

In other news:

In other news, the CCP Eve Fanfest was last week, and they revealed some World of Darkness things. WoD News is the best source of info. Politics. Backstabbing. Fashion, and some sort of follower crafting system maybe like TOR. You’re a vampire queen. You don’t want to darn stockings or do embroidery.

The names Edward and Bella were also announced to be banned. CCP has a modest team of 70 people on WoD now, and the release won’t be before 2015. This makes fang-banging kitties a little sad. For perspective, Blizzard’s new MMO, the “Titan” project, has 150 people on it now, per rumors.

We are expected to hear more about Blizzard’s Titan this year, which is slated to test in 2014, and possibly release. The best current situation sum-up I’ve seen is over at Titan Focus.

Guild Wars 2: First Impressions

So I was looking for a new game, and Guild Wars 2 won the showdown by virtue of going on sale (again) for $40, plus offering a free trial key, which I picked up from Curse on Thursday.

A few keys might still be available. I don’t know. I thought about giving a heads-up on my blog, but the download was super-impressively fast, and then I was in the game playing.

GW2 is an amazing and beautiful game. It kind of reminds me of Aion but dialed up to 12. It’s a single purchase to play with no subscription fee, which did gave it an edge over SWTOR or Mists of Pandaria, other possibilities.

Guild Wars 2 also offers Spanish, which is another perk for me. This is enabled by a mix of voice and text that is very effective. When the mechanics of the story delivery are invisible, you’ve got it right. The Sylvari (the GW2 plant-based rendition of pointy-ears) turned out to be pretty cool.

Sylvari is the race for me, and I think Thief is the class. I’m still depressed over quitting my L65 Burglar in the other MMO I play, because the Burglar just doesn’t stack up to my Lore-Master for various reasons. Well, the GW2 Thief can swap daggers for dual-wield pistols in a heartbeat, so that’s an issue solved.

I’ve looked at countless videos and articles about this game, and lots of good things have been said. I don’t want to go crazy on all of the good things. I could write a long essay. For example, Angry Joe’s fun video review on this is memorable. He rates the game a 10/10 with a “badass seal of approval”, a game that belongs in your “liberry”.

The dynamic (public) quests and cooperative gameplay really are a big deal for MMO innovation, and a lot of fun. I’ve been revived a number of times by other players, and it’s a warm fuzzy for sure. On the other hand, I know that GW2 has issues with dungeons due to no holy trinity, and lack of a trinity means lack of group roles, so how deep can the cooperation hole go?

Also, what happened when I tried to /thank cooperative people for giving a poor thief a hand? Um. Nothing. Nada. In fact, the list of GW2 emotes is a little short at the moment.

Another trivial thing that shocked me was no lipstick. Ten minutes into creating my first character, I was alt-tabbing and searching Google in disbelief. Surely, I thought, there is a hidden color picker somewhere. Nope. Dolce & Gabbana have left the building.

So the only flaw of my character is her lips, which are an off-body color. Still eminently kissable. No need to panic.

Supposedly one of the GW2 writers is disappointed that a great majority of players are choosing Human, so players are widely missing the great stories he wrote for the other races. Well, it seems obvious that if the races are ugly, less people are going to play them.

Exhibit a: those poor Trolls in WoW, ever vying with Dwarf and Gnome for least played race in the game. I’ve tried a half dozen times to make a female Troll, but it’s never, ever going to happen. It’s going to be the same with the female Asura in GW2.

There is no good-looking female hair for Asura, while there are many more and better hair options for human and Sylvari women. Asura and Charr women also have NO breasts. Who wants to be a member of a race with no breasts? Maybe Asura are actually amphibians of some kind, but Charr are surely mammals, aren’t they?

This is admittedly kitty logic and not rocket scientist logic, but still valid.

Asura could have been properly cute, but instead they look like walking salamanders. And I don’t mean D&D salamanders, which are more attractive. Maybe they were going for a Harry Potter house-elf look. I don’t know.

So, the kitty conclusion is: here GW2, take my money, thanks for the free trial key. I love you. This is the game I want to play right now. The word on Neverwinter is two more classes in the works. I’ll be waiting on those instead of showing up at launch next week. That’s fine.

Syp (or maybe we are back to Justin Olivetti again per the current byline) interviewed Andy Valesquez this last week and did get an interesting explanation on why so few classes at launch in Neverwinter:

“We figured that if the classes we released were really good, people would stick around to see what comes later, as opposed to if we put out a bunch of classes that are whatever, then nobody will care when we say that class 10 is coming next month.”

Here’s hoping that works for them.

Looking For A Good Game World

Syp at Biobreak wrote a short post this morning on five things he wants to find out in a beta. I thought number five, “the full map of the world”, is a good point.

For example, right now I’m starting a five-day vacation, and I’m looking for a game to play while not working on my novel. My options:

+100% XP anniversary weekend in the Tolkien MMO. Leveling my Captain from 75 into Rohan, which I swore not to do. I already have three characters at cap. I don’t need another one. Still. It’s solid fare. It’s paid for.

Guild Wars 2. If it happens to go on sale again in the next couple days, that could tip me to pull the trigger. Every time I think seriously about playing this game though, I look at race selection videos, and none of the races appeal to me. Sylvari are alright, but I want to play the evil sect, just like I want to side with the dragons in Skyrim.

SWTOR subscription. I’m trending in this direction. It’s already installed on my hard drive. My LGBT romance boycott is over. I spent two hours last night looking at video and information on classes and companions. Apparently a subscription solves all problems like in the Tolkien MMO. The PvP looks good.

It’s mainly depressing that I can’t romance any of these interesting female NPCs unless I play as a male. I decided that the Sith Warrior has some nice female companions, plus a male doctor. If I’m going to do a man, he can at least be attentive and rich!

These are all good options. I realized this morning though that I have no concept of the size and scope of the game worlds in SWTOR and GW2, despite watching countless videos and reading many articles and webpages.

Why don’t I? I even played the SWTOR beta to level ten. I know there is no space combat (boo), and there are X number of planets, a number that doesn’t mean anything to me.

I also realize that I never looked closely at the Neverwinter world map beyond the city itself. Meanwhile, going to the volcano and fighting giants is something I most want to do in that game. That Neverwinter video expanded the game world both in my visual sense and my imagination, and it was very effective.

If you pick up a good book on writing sci-fi or fantasy fiction, it will tell you that setting description is super-important in these genres. It might be something that is falling short when advertising MMOs.

The typical fly-through video clips often aren’t good enough. They need to also evoke the player’s imagination far beyond what is seen, in terms that imply a translation into concrete game scope, not just empty advertising adjectives.

Defiance Pilot: Must See TV

I watched the pilot episode of Defiance tonight.  It’s currently available online at SyFy.com, full length with no commercials.  The show features a cast of great characters and actors with a very interesting post-apocalyptic setting.

I’ve visited St. Louis a number of times, and the difference in the alien-terraformed terrain was actually jarring (St. Louis is flat heartland with a river running through it–no mountains, waterfalls, or canyons, of course.)  Some people have criticized the special effects.  Some were great, some were not so much, but overall this is a truly spectacular achievement for a 90-minute pilot sci-fi show.

My only niggles are that more backstory would have helped, as well as one loveable Kaylee-type character. The HBO series Deadwood has the same scenario as Defiance.  Everyone is tough, hard-edged survivor type, and if they aren’t, then they aren’t a main character (at least in this episode).  As far as the lore, an article on AfterEllen helped me out a little bit with what’s going on.

I’d definitely like to see some more episodes, and I’d like to check out the MMO at some point just to spend time with Nolan and Irisa if nothing else. If you missed this show on its premier night and you’re even 25% a sci-fi fan, I would recommend going and checking it out.

 

More Reading:

 

ET interviews Julie Benz re: tough female characters 04/15/13

Elder Scrolls Video Leaked 4/14

A short time ago, a first twenty-minute video was leaked from the Elder Scrolls beta. Massively reported it (which seems like questionable ethics for Massively?). The video was immediately taken down, but it is also hosted on another gaming site here.

So, check it out if it’s still there. I did click this link to make sure it is working. The site looks a little slow.

A lot of people had negative things to say on Massively, but I really liked what I was seeing. It’s a very realistic, immersive game world. You can die from a couple wolves, unlike in Neverwinter, where can slaughter groups of enemies with no problem even at level two or three, a fact which I don’t like because it isn’t realistic.

I do not need to feel like a walking goddess at level two. One or two musty skeletons should be enough for a fresh-faced young halfling.

The sounds in the video are great. The music especially struck me as being classic, calm orchestra music which I prefer in an MMO. This is in stark contrast to Cryptic’s style in Neverwinter, where I actually turned off the music in the character creator, turned it on in the game, then turned it off again.

I did not hear a combat music track in TES:O beta, either, which is a relief. I always have the music off in that Tolkien MMO, even with the great Rohan soundtrack that I’ve never listened to, because I can’t stand the over-excited combat track that kicks in, as it has for the last five years.

The voice-overs also seem well done. I thought they had developed the minimal interface into something more MMO-like and less like the Skyrim interface that was much maligned. That doesn’t seem to be on display here. Surely they will at least be showing proper buff durations in TES:O, especially since PvP is in play.

Too bad someone felt the need to get their beta invite and immediately break the NDA (if that is what happened), but without any invitation extended to the kitties, we have as much sympathy as moon sugar in the wind. This is the way of the kitty.