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.

More Reading:

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.

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.

Asshats Have A Place In Gaming Culture

There is a lot I could say about the Neverwinter Beta (round two for me) this last weekend.

I got to L20. I got a companion (the dog) and enjoyed some outdoor scenery, which didn’t win any Kitty awards, but it was acceptable. It wasn’t “open world” as much as I expected.

Healing aggro was broken. All gear rewards I received were unusable due to one or two levels above me. Cleric self-heals were nerfed to such uselessness that I took them off my bar. I was not happy and quit playing halfway through Saturday.

Not because a class was nerfed in beta. I just began to realize that the Neverwinter store sells healing and resurrection, so clerics will be competing with the store.

For example, my cleric died a number of times due to the self-heal nerf. On the death screen, I had an option to buy a Cure Serious Wounds scroll from the store, but I could *not* cast a CSW to save my own life.

This is stupid. Also, to quote someone in the forums: “The only way to resurrect someone at this point is to pay real money for a rez scroll from the zen store, and I think that’s a HUGE mistake.” I also imagine clerics will now be potion-buyers, including, no doubt, premium store potions.

I.e. from another quote, which I found to be true: “The Cleric with no heals (now) uses far more pots than any other class.” I agree, and at the same time the DPS stayed low, and worse yet per another cleric forum thread, this situation will not be changed back. I used many healing potions from level 14 to 20, and made lots of repeated runs back to the healing circle to get healed up.

Between this and the gearing/time necessities of being a healer in the first place, which also typically involve store usage, and the inability to target except by facing, I no longer plan to play a cleric. I’m thinking to wait for more classes, like a paladin or druid, and wait for TESO at the same time. Of course, DDO players had to wait for years to get a Druid class, if I remember right.

A D&D cleric without a rez or raise dead, because those are store-only? Really?! F2P makes my head explode.

PAX East ended over the weekend, and news-wise it seemed to fall flat. Turbine didn’t have a booth at all. Blizzard had a big announcement that fizzled (a trading card game based on WoW). Chris at Levelcapped wrote a nice PAX mega-postup. The most interesting observations to me were how the people at PAX East were obnoxious. He says:

“People just seem to really prefer being angry, annoyed, and grumpy, and find it easier to give into the need to let anyone and everyone know about it. I cannot fathom how people claim to love gaming, yet feel that it’s more important to be negative, to be abusive to one another, and to treat one another and the hobby like absolute shit.“

I then noticed in his previous post that he has only just reached level cap with his second character ever. The mystery is solved. This is probably why he is still in a good mood. Not enough raiding or endgame PvP gear grinds. He also calls gaming a “hobby” and not a lifestyle.

Chris is obviously a dedicated gamer and great writer, but I wouldn’t dis people for douchebaggery when they are ten times more dedicated than you are. Hardcore and douchebaggery go hand in hand, and they are an important part of the scene. They go hand in hand with gaming.

In fact, I don’t like obnoxious, annoying people either in real life, but how can you argue that Fawkes (Will Wheaton) and the Axis Of Anarchy jerks in The Guild aren’t part of what makes gaming awesome and never boring?

First of all, this is nothing new. Before video games, there was chess, which has a history filled with jerks, egotists, racists, and general troglodytes. Certainly not all arrogant jerks are good players, and maybe these are the people to whom Chris is referring.

My point is just that as an average (expert-level in college) player, I would never bash a chess grandmaster because he is a jerk. If he smelled bad, I would never mention it.

Speaking of chess, there is another factor to consider: a lot of people see games as a competition, even MMOs. The goal is to win, even by cheating.

For example, to continue the chess analogy, in a college tournament in Florida, I had a winning chess position against an older guy, an average player. His side was in bad shape, and he had no move left except to lose. He offered a draw. I took it. Why?

I’m a Buddhist. Then and now, I don’t really care about winning. I did this all the time, even in tournaments. I drew a lot of winning positions. I really don’t like confrontation, and actually prefer cooperative games over games where you try to “beat” people.

So in chess if someone offered a draw when their position seemed lost, I considered it to be lame, undignified, dishonorable, and I lost respect for that person, but I typically went with it. I won, and I didn’t care about the official score.

So what did this guy do? When we signed each others’ scorecards, he wrote a comment insulting my intelligence, as if to say “sucker!” Who is the idiot? Maybe the idiot is the guy who cares about winning so much instead of playing with class, which is what a lot of game developers are doing with F2P and DLC these days.

What’s the moral of the story? Badass can be classy, but it can also be 100% pathetic. Which are you?

People these days like to bash and make fun of forum trolls, crybabies, playstyle snobs, and angry gamers, and I don’t like this trend. I support evil (excepting corporate evil ruining RPGs, which is another story). These people are a real and entertaining part of the gaming culture, and I love them. Even Francis.

A new MMO blogger came onto the Kitty radar today. If you’d like to see some more blogging about the Neverwinter Beta, plus some pics, the LvlingLife blog is worth a look. She apparently did not see what the cleric was like two weeks ago, so she will probably cope.

Turbine’s Sci-Fi IP?

I’ve speculated for quite a while about Turbine’s next MMO, the MMO they’ve supposedly been working on. I won’t go into the history because I did that in another post around this time last year.

Recently we saw a mysterious button appear in the Tolkien MMO interface called the “Space Combat Panel”. This looked a lot like a quirky hint. Turbine doesn’t have a habit of throwing random things into their carefully lore-crafted game.

This last week I was browsing Glassdoor.com and noticed a reviewer of Turbine mention that Turbine has “fantasy/sci-fi” IPs. Well, they don’t have any sci-fi IP on record that I know of, technically speaking, unless you want to count the mechanical aspects of Eberron.

So what could be Turbine’s sci-fi IP, if the hints are solid enough add up to something? Warner Brothers has very recently announced an Odyssey-in-space movie project that they hope will turn into a future franchise.

That could be really interesting.

What else? Blade Runner is a bit short on space combat. Roswell doesn’t seem to lend itself well. The Wildstar MMO currently has the jump, thematically and storywise, on the lack of anyone else stepping up and making an MMO out of Firefly.

I feel confident that the American Wild West is a better mix with Sci-Fi than the Greeks, comparing to the Odyssey-in-space idea.

I don’t know, and it’s bedtime for the kitty. I’ve been hard at work in the last few weeks with my Web Design class and working on my new website, which I purchased the domain for last weekend.

Neverwinter: Getting It Right And Wrong

I was watching a Nightline piece tonight about Pixar studios, and an exec (I missed his name) said that Pixar has developed great technology, but their main goal has never been for the audience to be interested in their technology. They’re all about story and characters.

And those things are how Pixar gets people of all ages to watch their movies–the story and characters. Can PC MMOs strive to do the same thing, luring new players with great stories as well as mindless sparkle trails with console game controls?

I’ve come to believe that this current trend is just a reset, establishing a new, wider baseline to build on. Players will get bored, and the bar will be raised again. In the meantime, while the difficulty and complexity strive to accommodate all ages and tastes (and the next gen consoles, probably), it seems like a perfect time to double down on great stories and memorable characters.

The essential components of fiction and immersion are so often are lost with the focus on graphics and gameplay. Not even a lot of bloggers talk about characters and story. This is one reason I like watching Angry Joe. He appreciates characterization as an important aspect of a good game.

I’ve only played one installment of Devil May Cry a long time ago, but I watched Joe’s entire review of “DMC” because I was intrigued by his criticism and analysis of how Capcom rebooted their main character, Dante.

I didn’t necessarily agree that it was a horrible thing, but I’m not a fan. I can understand getting bent out of shape over seeing a beloved character turned into something else that might appeal more to the next generation.

I do think Neverwinter needs more focus on their story and less on combat and crotch shots. I’m not even going to get started on that video. We’ve come a long way from the Neverwinter Nights 2 days, when players complained in the forums at release about the overly conservative, silly-looking Star Trek underwear.

Earlier tonight I was watching Youtube videos of the Neverwinter beta, and I was thinking that no one is talking much about the story of Neverwinter or the characters. One exception was the video on Massively last week that talked about story and lore in the form of Mount Hotenow, which actually focused only 30% on clips of players fighting.

That video pulled me in like no other. Fire Giants are classic. I want to level up, go to the volcano, and fight a war against the fire giants.

Anyway. I’ve linked my favorite video below of the ones I watched. Ghost has a smooth, easygoing voice (overly aggressive, egotistical voice in videos kind of turns me off). He also seems to have a higher opinion of the character creation than some I’ve heard, which is encouraging.

Neverwinter seems to be getting the character creation right. It’s critical to allow players make a likeable, viable character to start the game, if you want to hook them.

This is in contrast to my experiences with DDO (you don’t get full attribute points to make your character unless you pay at the start of the game) and SWTOR’s blunder (only a few races available.) So that’s my opinion on that. Here’s the video, and a direct link.

Best Of The Week: On Races And Equality

My fave game news this week was the new Elder Scrolls Online dev video that was released today. (Linked at bottom of post.) I also liked the news that Defiance (the TV show coming on the SciFi channel that is linked to Trion’s new MMO) will be sexy, like Battlestar Galactica, and also star Mia Kirshner, who was a major character in the L-Word.

Apparently the brothels in Defiance are women-empowered and feature equal-opportunity male studs. Lovely. Unfortunately I don’t think we’ll see a lot of romance in Trion’s Defiance game since it’s mostly about blowing stuff up.

In other obliquely game-related news, BBC reported today on sexism on fantasy and sci-fi fiction covers. This was a good and interesting article, offering no concrete conclusions or solutions (of course) but much better reading and visuals than the average game forum debate.

The art of the week goes to Almalexia cosplay by Anhenrose. The living goddess Almalexia is a divine of the Tribunal in Morrowind, oh, glorious and lovely Morrowind, in the second age of Tamriel a member of the Ebonheart Pact. So. Which of the three factions are you going to play in the Elder Scrolls Online?

The video released today makes the decision even more intriguing.

The lore preview video was delivered fabulously by Lawrence Schick, “Lead Loremaster” for TESO, who riveted the kitty’s attention with his fire and brimstone voice. He wrote the old D&D module White Plume Mountain, so he knows something about fire and brimstone. White Plume wasn’t my most fave adventure module back in the day, compared to Gygax’s Giant and Drow modules, but it was fine and playable.

The three-faction setup in TESO may cause player vs. player conflict both in game and in real life. The races are highly divided, moreso than other MMOs. Rift and SWTOR both feature two sides with dedicated races that are defined more by ideologies that transcend their race identities, while WoW offers two sides with enough race choices for everyone to like.

A lot of RPG players have already played the single player Elder Scrolls, on the other hand, and have surely have developed favorites among the races that they might prefer to play. Since the factions are at war, apparently you can’t just go play whatever start zone, but at this point it’s unclear as to how guilds and friends will work in terms of factions.

Players are already speculating in online discussions that everyone is going to want to play Morrowind and Skyrim, which are the dominion of the Ebonheart Pact. I too would love to see Morrowind in updated beauty and without Imperial presence (because TESO will take the stage in the older second era time period.)

I loved the old religion in Morrowind. The factional conflict between the Tribunal vs. the Nine was a part of the lore depth that made Morrowind such a great game.

I also like the Aldmeri Dominion though, which features two of the three Elf races, plus a female Elf leader. Unfortunately, I’m not a big fan of how either the Bosmer or Altmer look in the Elder Scrolls, or their racials, and at least one poll suggests other players feel similarly. Aldmeri may be the weakest faction, but with Khajit added to the mix, it will be the definition of sexy.

Yes, the Aldmeri Dominion will be the place to be for making ERP under the moon-sugared stars, leaving the war to the Nords and the Orcs.

I’ve actually played a Breton instead of an Elf in every Elder Scrolls game that I’ve played (for the Mage-friendly stats and the looks) which would mean The Daggerfall Covenant, but I sort of loathe orcs. Redguard are alright, but I can’t imagine allying with orcs, nor does a merchant king sound very appealing.

I went Defiant in Rift partly for the female leaders, and that will play a part in my TESO decision for sure.

So will I play TESO at launch? I’m not a fan of the active block-and-dodge action combat. It does depend a little on the payment landscape. I still have a mindset that I want an MMO to be a long-term home and commitment. I know that while I shied away from Guild Wars 2, I’ll be 500% more likely to pay whatever ticket price to see Tamriel just as a tourist.

More Reading:

Ask the devs: Aldmeri Dominion
Ask the devs: Daggerfall Covenant
Ask the devs: Ebonheart Pact
MMORPG Article: Faction Balance in TESO
RPG Gamer TESO Hands On
2009 interview with Lawrence Schick.

2012 MMO RPG Year In Review

In this post, I’ll talk the normal best-of 2012, as well as game design ideas I’m calling “faction immersion”, and wind up with what I’m looking forward to in 2013 (Neverwinter, and changes to this blog).

I’m just going to throw all this out there in a concise mess, like a cat getting into a sewing box. I’ll declare an underdog winner for best game, and go into what I’m most looking forward to in 2013.

This topic has percolated in my brain for days, going in all different directions. I’ve been distracted by my break-up issues with LotRO and my most recent flirtation with Fable 3.

The best thing so far about Fable 3 is that it introduced me to Angry Joe through his hilarious review. (Angry Joe is my new game-blogger love, by the way. You’re probably relieved, Justin.) The second best thing about Fable 3 is the DLC (i.e. black dye for $3, and three new dog models being nearly a 400MB download). The Fable 3 DLC is mainly good because it gives me new ways to insult DLC.

Best Game Experience of 2012

A lot of people, like Angry Joe in his video blog yesterday, are calling Guild Wars 2 the game of the year. It probably is, but I can’t call it the GOTY because I skipped it. Why?!? Did I miss my saving roll on intelligence?

To sum up: Rohan and the The Secret World. Then my new computer didn’t arrive until November. There are plant people in GW2 instead of true hot-blooded pointy-ears. Also, I played GW1 to level cap as a Monk. GW1 was good, and GW2 is far better, but the original is still stuck in my head in a way that makes #2 sound not as thrilling as “Kingdoms of Amalur” for example. If ArenaNet had called the game something else like “Legends of Tyria”, that might have helped.

One example of something I don’t like about the GW: the single short skill bar. Justin Olivetti on Massively wrote just this morning about his fear of letting a group down, and recounts when his GW1 guild raid needed him to have his rez skill handy, but he didn’t, to his humiliation. Why didn’t he? Mainly because of the four-inch Guild Wars skill bar. (I’m calling it four inches with tongue firmly in cheek.)

I am also assuming that Guild Wars 2 is on the start of the curve of F2P store oppression, which is yet another reason to avoid a commitment. I can’t speak on treatment of women, except that you can play one in the first place, which is something to appreciate and not to take for granted.

I played a nice little Flash RPG last night called Talesworth Arena. It offers three classes, which only turned out to be all male after I started playing. I honestly thought that psionicist class was a punk lesbienne with girl-chesticles.

Anyway. I can say my peak vicarious GW2 experience without playing the game is watching Angry Joe orate about it. So until I play this supposedly great game, my pick for best game experience of the year is The Secret World.

The Secret World: One Final Blurb

The Secret World was a breath of fresh air. I played the beta and knew I’d buy and play the game. I ordered a new computer to do it. I loved this game for my first month. The graphics are fantastic, which translates into a good-looking character that looked and felt like a tough cookie, even if she wasn’t. This was good for immersion. Killing lots of zombies is also fun.

TSW has nice cutscenes and voicing. There are lots of puzzles, which is very different. Unfortunately some of the puzzles need Google to solve them, and you can spend a half hour trying to solve a puzzle on your own, only to then Google and find out there was no way you could have ever solved that puzzle on your own, so you wasted your time.

I’d like to go on about a lot positive things in The Secret World, like the skill wheel system, but the game is in a state of flux having just gone F2P, so I don’t feel comfortable with the facts. Just go play the game, if you haven’t.

I notice you can get store pay-for-progress boosts of AP now, and movement boosts. Subscribing gives you +100% XP for kills which is pretty normal, like LotRO. So this seems like friendly F2P so far.

I’ve tried to solve the puzzle of this being a one-monther for me. Here’s the most interesting of my reasons and observations.

See my Buddhist graphic above? (First of all, it’s a Buddhist graphic because I have no TSW screenshots because they didn’t work. Known bugs aren’t fun.) So I’m a peaceful Buddhist on a good day and an evil witch on a bad day. Meanwhile, Justin Olivetti (Biobreak) adores The Secret World more than any other game writer I’ve seen.

See his bio link? Yes, he’s a youth pastor, a Christian I assume. That’s fantastic. So what’s the most popular faction in The Secret World, with headquarters in the game’s capital city, London? The Templars, the faction that Justin said he knew he was going to be playing, even before the game launched.

Is there a conclusion here? The Secret World really opened my eyes to the importance of faction immersion to gameplay–feeling like you’re a part of a group. It makes complete sense to me that a Christian would get into a faction that relates so much to Christian history, and they even have gear and overhead symbols with cool-looking cross emblems. Super-cool, if you’re a Christian.

For me, TSW really made their three factions (Templar, Illuminati or “lumies”, Dragon) important to their immersion and story, then failed to write them in an appealing way.

So there I was with two faction choices since I refuse to play Templar. I made a young, blonde Buddhist hippy girl, who tried to join the Dragon. So they grabbed her, threw her out of a van, told her the way it was going to be, shooed her off, and were basically rude. They didn’t make me feel welcome or happy to be a part of them, especially since they are terrorists.

My second character was Rainie “Queensnake” Lee, a Chaotic Good poker player from Las Vegas with a shotgun and a character trait (made-up for RP purposes) for quick figuring of low odds of survival. She joined the Lumies, but totally didn’t fit into their corporate culture. I did feel like a low-level employee, so I guess that worked, at least, but not for Queensnake. She was ready to high-tail it back to Vegas and start drinking.

They gave her an irremovable implant against her will, and lots of orders.

So what I needed was for these factions to be happy to see me. I needed to feel happy to see them, like I belonged in some way. Maybe I needed an occult tattoo from the Dragon, like the hunters in the Hostel movies. I don’t think the Dragon appeals to players who want to play evil. Evil is a lot about ego and stroking, not putting up with rudeness and some kind of divine child king. Yolari and I agreed that the Dragon could have been magic-based, and that TSW needed a faction of magicians and sorcerers.

Is that it? No. Lack of immersion was compounded by the hordes of monsters everywhere. Zombies, sea monsters, insects, demons pouring from hell all within spitting distance from each other. Why? Gameplay reasons, I assume. Justin has played this game for months, and even he apparently still doesn’t know what the fog is about.

For immersion to happen, things need to make sense. As Jack Bickham says in his writing book Scene and Structure, for fiction to be believable, it needs to be even more believable than reality. Readers simply don’t follow when random things suddenly happen with no explanation. “The world is ending, and end times are near! Be scared!” I’m just not scared.

That’s another thing with good fiction, especially in an RPG. It needs to be personal. The factions were impersonal, and the bosses didn’t care about me. I didn’t care about them. I didn’t have a dog, an in-game family or friends (to my character), or anyone for my character to care about in that game.

(Except for Yolari, and I do feel a little bad about calling it on her while she was up for playing the game longer. Yolari then refused to give me her 2012 game of the year comments for this blog, maybe due to shyness, but probably out of vengeance for abandoning her to the giant insects.)

Do MMO RPGs need to cater so much to these RPG tastes? No, but a good story is worth the effort, because it gets a player involved in his or her character. A player who likes their character stays. Some writers aren’t doing it as well as they could, unless they are working for Bioware. Or maybe the writers would like to do more, but unfortunately the game producers and team leads are themselves not writers, and have other considerations, like cost, and mass killing is mandatory as everyone knows.

Looking Forward 2013

Like the graphic above hints, my goal is to go retro in 2013, and play a lot more single player. I’m returning to the RPG roots. I bought Dragon Age Origins:Ultimate from Steam last week, and my goal is to play that again, this time on PC, with DLC and the expansion, and in Spanish. Ditto for Skyrim, which I just bought tonight. I also want to play Baldur’s Gate again, since maybe my favorite RPG ever, Baldur’s Gate 2, is coming out in enhanced edition in 2013. BG2:EE and Neverwinter are my two most-anticipated games of next year.

Elder Scrolls Online is a wild card. I’d really like to see interplanar travel, which I hope to include somehow in my prospective Neverwinter modules. The Planescape Torment experience is something I’ve wanted to relive for years now. I was always hoping Rift would take adventurers into other planes, but not yet, if ever. They added more continents instead. Elder Scrolls, of course, has Oblivion and Shivering Isles, and other realms where gods live.

I’m looking forward to Neverwinter (i.e. their robust player content creation tool) because I want to write games my way. I want to write a great RPG story. I’ve already got dark settings looming in my head while at work, interesting characters speaking in my inner ear, and plot twists involving corruption and evil. In direct response to the failure of Secret World to hold my interest in terms of immersion, my goal is to write a faction that you’ll be working for, and write it well.

A big caveat about Neverwinter is the fact that it is F2P. Wanting to play Neverwinter is like wanting to eat an apple that I know for a fact is laced with slow poison, because I’m hungry.

I’m also still looking for World of Darkness to appear on the horizon. I’ve also started studying Flash programming, so I can make not only better guides, but also maybe write my own little game. I’m on the fence right now about whether to take classes at the local college this spring. I did try to enroll, but my account had an issue, and now the offices are closed.

Also in 2013, I’ve got ideas to design a new website focused on bilingual language learning. This means that I might move Kitty Kitty Boom Boom over to a proprietary domain and work on a blog that is bilingual in Spanish. I’m thrilled that Steam is offering downloads in Spanish, and that a lot of games these days have a Spanish translation.

I’m a serious student, and I study Spanish every day. I’m currently halfway through the Fellowship of the Ring in Spanish translation. Playing Dragon Age and Skyrim on my new PC will be like studying and playing at the same time.

This might be my last post for a bit, unless some amazing news breaks about an upcoming game, like World of Darkness or the SWTOR expansion that I would feel compelled to talk about. Thanks for reading my blog, and best wishes for happy gaming in the New Year!

Quotes Of The Week

“Indeed, while most games have “log in” or “play” on their startup screen, WoW has “Enter World”. I wonder just how subtle of a difference that makes.”

~ Lethality commenting on The Decline of Worlds, Terra Nova blog.

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“Planescape: Torment never revealed the second secret to great writing: nothing matches it before or after, in or out of the RPG sphere. Despite competent gameplay, Torment is best known for its story and characters, rendered phenomenally through immaculate dialogue.”

~ Kyle E. Miller for RPGFan Top Ten Best-Written RPGs

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“I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate again recently, and it’s reignited my appreciation for RPGs that can properly kick your ass. There’s nothing quite like the quickload abusing challenge of trying to take down a lone polar bear without it wiping out half your party, deranged Beserker and all.”

~ Phil Savage for PCGamer.

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