The Weekly Worm

In fourth grade, my teacher Mrs. Black had me do this special class project. I’d write a weekly illustrated newsletter for our class. So I did little drawings and wrote jokes and whatever brilliant journalism I could scribe in pencil, and the teacher would photocopy those and hand them out to the entire class.

That was a lot of pressure in fourth grade.

I remember that I had the idea to list the students who got a gold star as one of the “columns”. It turned out that only I and Lisa ever got gold stars, which was embarrassing. So I dropped that column as a dubious self-pleasuring exercise.

After about six weeks The Weekly Worm became more of a thankless task, a chore. I never heard anything like “Nice job, Jackie! Loved your article about Star Wars lunch boxes.” So I appreciate all of my readers and those who comment on Kitty Kitty.

The highlight of this last week for me was Scott Hartsman leaving Trion. I really hold Scott in high esteem, and I think he is a big reason for the esteem I have for Rift in terms of integrity. I’ve read through his Twitter and personal site, and I see no news as to where he is going.

Another tidbit I noticed this week came from Justin at Biobreak, with a quote from SOE President John Smedley suggesting we might see Everquest Next this year. Hartsman has worked most of his career on Everquest 2, so maybe he’ll be involved. Crazy notion.

In any case, I’m intrigued to see where Hartsman goes, and Everquest Next adds a third big MMO pouncing into the spotlight this year along with Neverwinter and Elder Scrolls. Elder Scrolls of course announced beta signups this last week as well, so you might jump on that if you haven’t.

I’m hoping. I’ve been checking my mail every day. It’s a battle of the betas at this point. Neverwinter vs. Elder Scrolls.

The TESO signup questionnaire was impressive. If the game is as good as the signup sheet, Elder Scrolls might rock the world in 2013 like Keen is predicting (#8). Also this week, we heard that Trion will be publishing Archeage in western markets, which is another step towards planting paws on those exotic shores.

I almost forgot that Neverwinter put up a new dev blog about gear. I’d like to quip that the blog post about gear is as forgettable as gear itself, but even as a non-gear oriented player, I have to admit that I’ve had a few special pieces of gear that I do remember.

I remember a lovely Hunter spear that gave me guilty pleasure, although it didn’t last very long. My newer Rune-Keeper, however, has never held a memorable rock. Hunters are just sexier in general.

You know, not blogging about that Tolkien MMO is going to be more difficult than I thought, especially when it’s such an fun target. Maybe I could just stick to pictures.

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!

Kitty Just Says No To LotRO

Update 9 for LotRO was released a few days ago, bringing the winter festival into the game, crafting XP, worldwide open-tapping and auto-looting, and the first instances post-Rohan.

The Rohan instances have nothing to do with Rohan, much to the dismay of a lot of players. Turbine is creating Hobbit-centric dungeons instead, but no advertising or leveraging of the Hobbit release have been reported at the time of this writing.

Meanwhile, both World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 are showing ads at the Hobbit movies instead of LotRO.

Turbine also added more store-pushing in the festival, as well as several new obtrusive store buttons on the interface, including silver coins on the quest tracker to buy an insta-port to turn the quest in, and a large button on the stable NPC (all fast travel NPCs).

This includes a lovely counter (see pic) showing how many store short-cuts you currently own.

I won’t bother bombasting over why dislike these new “features”. I’ve wasted enough time posting in the forums. What I will do is no longer post about LotRO on my blog.

Moreover, I am converting my LotRO guides into guides to Rift instead. My Newbie Guide To LotRO, with 3,668 views in a little over a year, is no longer a 100% happy, positive, pro-LotRO document. I just state the facts. I cannot in good conscience promote this company while in a state of disgust.

Yolari is checking out Rift again, although she echoes what I said in my previous post about too much action and not enough story and immersion. I logged into SWTOR last night and lasted about zero minutes in the game. I didn’t even create a character because most of the races were greyed out. I could not re-create my beta character.

A SWTOR expansion “Rise of the Hutt Cartel” was announced yesterday. If they bring the LGBT content, I will be 100% to buy and play SWTOR this spring.

Here is a fabulous hint to all brain-dead MMO developers out there: players who like their character will keep playing. Players who don’t, won’t. I didn’t get into DDO because Turbine didn’t let me create a viable character without paying at level one. I seem to be in a state of F2P shock. I need a stomach pump and some oxycodone.

Rift honestly treats its player base amazingly. They gave me a special account title over there honoring the fact that my Rift guides have been visited about 50,000 times. I don’t even have a forum title at LotRO.

I was actually thinking about Neverwinter all day today at work, and creating ideas for a campaign I’d like to make. A lot depends on the scripting events you can do, so I’m hoping Cryptic will follow through with the beta invites for Champions lifers.

The Cryptic guys seem supremely confident with this, too, in video interviews. They should be confident given how much longer they’ve worked on this project than either of their previous releases. When I look at the Elder Scrolls rep people in video, I see some tension and uncertainty. Of course, their stakes are probably higher and the expectations are a lot bigger.

Returning To Rift: It’s For The Boys

Trion invited former Rift players back this weekend to have a look at their Storm Legion expansion. I was excited to see Rift on my new computer, so I re-installed on my sleek SSD (Solid State Drive).

My first adventure, while the game updated, was to click the ad on the launcher for the sexy black “Submit” T-shirt. Who hasn’t clicked that link, right? So. All of the shirts are for guys. I think it’s great for guys to submit to Crucia, and it’s even greater to have a powerful female antagonist in an MMO expansion, but this is a typical situation for Rift. I’ve blogged in the past about the sexist female outfits *in* the MMO. Irony! Or something. Moving on.

After updating, I started a new character just to get the feel of things. Trion changed the start of the game quite a bit, so I stopped and made a few changes to my Rift newbie guide here on Kitty Kitty. First of all, the new “purposes” in character creation seem like a nice idea.

New players can get into the game more quickly by clicking a button instead of having to choosing souls, but I honestly liked picking a soul combo in the old days. When I make a character, I want to know everything about every class. This may be a habit from D&D and other games that lock you into one class and/or role, of course. Rift doesn’t really do that. Anyway, I hadn’t played five minutes before I was Googling to figure out what to do.

So I checked out Freemarch and Meridian with my Defiant warrior. My console controller worked great, without re-configuring anything different from LotRO. I didn’t like my skin color and re-made my character, only to realize that the lighting is vastly different in character creation than in the ark rooms where you spawn. It was a similar situation at launch, without going into boring details. Dear devs everywhere, this is not good.

I was prepared to see graphical wonders in Rift, but it was a mistake to think Rift would be the best looking game on my brand new computer. Rift vs. LotRO on ultra settings seems like overall a wash. Rift has better polygons. LotRO has equal textures, with better distant landscapes and definitely better skies and water, at least from what I saw. Rift interiors and definitely surfaces are better (bump-mapping?). My Bahmi’s skin looks nice up close.

At first I thought my hi-res textures for Rift hadn’t loaded properly, because even my armor was bland. I checked the performance settings on my Catalyst panel. I found a forum thread on this topic. I ended up verifying that my new warrior outfit textures did match up to screenshots of what they should be on the highest settings. So that was that.

I then went to check out my main, a L50 mage. I decided that rebuilding even one skill tree to use was going to take a lot of time. I grabbed my mail instead and noticed a quest to investigate a wrecked ship, so I sallied forth with a few simple fireballs and chloro heals in my pocket, noticing that my quest said that I was to speak with a queen.

I was intrigued. Who is this Queen Miela? Why did her ship wreck right there off of Shoreward Island? Where did she get that beautiful outfit? And those shoes!? I still don’t know. I spoke to her, and she didn’t have time for questions or a proper introduction. She said the situation was pressing, and I was to man the scatterguns and hop on the anti-aircraft batteries because some hordes of monsters were coming.

Right then I nearly collapsed from a series of terrible World of Warcraft flashbacks. This is typical game writing for both WoW and Trion. Action first, ask questions later. I guess most players will get impatient without something to kill. This is why I quit WoW. I had no clue what the story was in Northrend. It was endless questing and killing with no purpose. No characters.

Characters are the heart of fiction. Is fiction the heart of an MMO, or action? I can get endless action in Diablo 3 or any game. I have always said that characterization is a weakness in Rift. What is the motivation of the NPC? What are the emotions? How does the NPC react to you? An NPC reacting to your character is like a double-bonus in writing quest text. You get two characters characterized (yours and the NPC) for the price of one, and a triple-bonus if the conversation happens to be about someone else.

At that point, I noticed the queen checking out the skimpy brassiere piece of my traditional Ethian dress, and even managed to grab a screenshot (the pic above). My heart skipped a beat. The queen was attractive, emotionally vulnerable in that moment, and probably rich. I wondered if we had a chance together, and regretted that I’d slotted points into Pyromancer and nothing in my Domination soul.

I decided that her name “Miela” was derived from the Spanish word “miel”, or honey, which is lovely, and not the vulgar “mierda” stuff implied by this thread in the Rift forums.

Ah, but I’ve just given myself away. Yes, I did log out of the game at that point so I could go back to Google. I want story, immersion, and fiction. I want roleplay. I don’t want to man the scatterguns. Seriously. And worse yet, per that same thread, the queen may be possessed and controlled by the dragon goddess Crucia, so a date won’t work out after all.

Undaunted, I quested onwards on the internet, trying to find something besides heavy artillery to get me interested in spending money to resub in Rift, buy the expansion, and spend the rest of the weekend wiping my skill bars and starting over. That’s a bit of headache and dinero.

I found a Youtube video of a Storm Legion dungeon. I liked the original Rift dungeons, and the dungeon finder tool is the best ever. Unfortunately, the devs were showing off a big mech with yes–more artillery and flame throwers, plus a cool jumping ability. And a *double jump* trick. Wow. Sorry, Mario. I also found the official trailer that claims massive battles with even more massive mech-y monsters.

Rift is a great MMO, and I’ll jump back in those waters at some point, but not today. Rift requires a lot of time, and I still need to finish Rohan in LotRO. This kitty may be sling-shotting from here to a F2P SWTOR installation this afternoon, however.

I’m supposed to be boycotting SWTOR due to their removal of LGBT content, but I’ve still got a holiday season new-game itch that maybe SWTOR could finish scratching. My foray into Secret World was short-lived for several reasons. I don’t want to bore even more, but these reasons are the lead-in to my punch-line.

I don’t want to solve puzzles using Google. It was frustrating in Secret World trying to solve puzzles. I tried. I wasn’t a big fan of the short, spammy skill bar either, and the skill wheel had broken tooltips that plain said the wrong thing–for over a month, at least. Maybe Funcom fired the guy who could fix tooltips, but still, every new player during that key horror/Halloween promotion period was misled and had to use Google to figure out how to put points in his or her skills.

I was simply not immersed. My character looked good with nice outfits, but she was kind of a robot. When I got my first call from the boss, I thought I’d get a promotion or something would happen to my character but no–they just wanted me to do XYZ and go back to questing. I killed over 1000 zombies. That was fun, and I don’t want to kill more zombies. I don’t want to blow things up with big guns.

I just want the queen’s shoes–those magical snowflake-colored shoes she was wearing.

Rift Adds More NPC Factions

Massively reported tonight on Rift’s new conquest PvP mode, which answers the question to the mystery of three factions posed last week. I’m a little intrigued and disappointed at the same time.

The good: these neutral factions, which move and exist in multi-dimensional space (official overview), make Rift more into the wild planar-focused game that I always wished it was more like. In other words, I’ve always wanted Rift to be the MMO version of Planescape Torment–full of mystery, wierdness, and amazing and exotic factions and characters to interact with. I want to leave Telara and journey to fantasy extraplanar cities, court mysterious demon women, speak with goddesses, or learn that I am one.

Not so good: this new form of gameplay pushes Rift even more towards an MMO I don’t want to play or go back to. It’s already a WoW-style raiding endgame, despite efforts to appeal to casuals like weddings and historical/lore instances. The new three-faction PvP now moves Rift still more towards a PvP-focused MMO. We have a lot of those. I also haven’t forgotten PvPing until my eyes bled just to get partway into the third PvP tier. I can’t imagine going back to that grind again. Normally I’m more fine with grinding than most.

Where does the disappointment come from? I was hoping when Trion hinted at three factions that they were going to add a third playable faction. That was probably too much to hope for, but it would have been a really big deal for Rift, and it could have enticed me. I might have gone back to play Rift this month if they had added a new race of warped panda-badgers or plant-lolitas or something with decent kung-fu.

I know–that would kind of be ripping off Mists of Pandaria, but hey–Turbine just added magic light crystals to LotRO as weapon enhancers, didn’t they?

Turbine dev #1: How can we compete against SWTOR? Our players are leaving. What do they have that we don’t?
Turbine dev #2: Light sabers, obviously.
Turbine dev #1: We need to make our Legendary Items more like light sabers.
Lead Designer: Power crystals. We can do this. Plus, we can sell premium crystals in the store for cash. Let’s make it happen.

Using A PS3 Controller For An MMO (Rift, LotRO, etc.)

Editor’s Note 12/18/12: this guide is being converted to a guide that focuses Rift instead of LotRO, so may have some glitches until I have time to test and fix it.

PvP and rift grinding in Rift can feel like C-clamps on the finger joints. A console controller might provide some relief–or so I hypothesized as I ran joyful raids all day in Black Gardens. Unfortunately, there is a lot of poorly presented information on the internet on the topic of using a PS3 controller with a PC. The old Youtube video that everyone seems to link disabled my mouse if I followed the instructions exactly, and if I tried to improvise, the controller wasn’t detected.

Here are the basic simple steps that finally worked for me–with specific notes on the things that tripped me up. This document means I won’t have to unravel this again when I get a new NPC, and it will save me from facepalm damage caused by watching Youtube videos. That said, I don’t claim to be an expert. I just want to record what worked–in detail–because it was a pain. I had zero success when I first tried doing this last year. NEW: I’ve also added a mapping template assistant (see links at end of post) to record your buttons in a more readable format to help get the skills set up.

(Note that if you’re a Microsoft drone using an XBOX controller, you should have no problems at all because that’s how Microsoft rolls, you know. (Teasing. A little bit.) So you can just install your controller via Microsoft’s software and official site help, and then skip to step 6 like a normal human being.)

Step 1 For Installing A PS3 Controller: Go to MotionInJoy and download the latest version of the program for your system. If you’re like me and can’t find any link at all, disable your AdBlock or download the program elsewhere. (edit Oct. 2012- avoid the big button-links that are actually other ‘featured’ programs. The links are now hidden in the version text.) Install. The software may auto-update when you first start it.

Step 2: Here are the instructions for the latest version of MotionInJoy to install it. If you’re on Vista, your install will not happen like this, and if you close the program, it will mysteriously refuse to start again. Headaches will continue until you right click and run as administrator.

Step 3: Plug in your controller to a USB port. The lights should blink. You can’t push the PS3 button, nor should you need to. Start the MotionInJoy program. It will not recognize your controller yet.

Step 4: With MotionInJoy open, click the Driver Manager tab at the top. Click the checkbox for your device (should be only one choice at this point, if not, unplug the controller and see which option disappears.) Click the Load Driver button. After some work, the panel will spit out an output indicating success. You may get a popup warning about publisher verification, but according to the MIJ site, this has been taken care of at the time of this writing.

Step 5: Click back to the Profile tab. On Windows Vista, unlike the official instructions, the program still did not recognize my controller, but I noticed a Windows icon on the taskbar asking me to restart to complete updates. (Windows 7 did not have this issue.) After restarting the computer, I opened MIJ and at that point my controller was finally recognized. The lights on the controller showed it was auto-charging (it will be steady red if already charged), and I praised the goddesses for having mercy on my soul. Select the Playstation 3 radio button and click the enable button at the bottom.

You can also vibrate yourself and do controller calibration through the controller panel button at the bottom. I did not need to do anything with this. The fact that all the PS3 controller buttons are being read should be good enough for your controller-to-key program to remap those buttons into being interpreted by the game program. If your computer is equipped with Bluetooth, try the official instructions for pairing your controller via the MIJ tool.

Step 6: Now you’re ready to download a program that reads the controller, interprets it, and sends the input to the game program that would ordinarily not take this input (i.e. LotRO). The two main choices appear to be Xpadder (shareware no choice) and JoyToKey. I will not link the commercial XPadder site because WordPress doesn’t like me doing that with their generous free hosting.

Step 7: Click “create” at the bottom left corner of the JoyToKey window to create a profile and name it. At this point, the list of Joystick options on the right should be registering your PS3 controller. Press buttons and watch to see what lines highlight. Double click the line with your mouse to open up the config window for that line. Enter the keyboard key to correspond with the controller button.

My initial setup is to use the L2 button for Cntrl modifier and the R2 button for Alt modifier on 8 buttons for a total of 24 possibilities. Moving your character with the left stick on the default setting is awkward. Go to the Options tab and increase the “threshold for input” to like 25-40%. This improves control.

Also in Options, under the “Show/Hide buttons menu, I enabled “Show all axes (8 way + POV +2). You will then see more Axis options in the Joystick 1 configurations, which will let you configure your right stick for mouse look. As an example, now double click Axis6(>0) and select the “mouse” tab option at the top. Click the “right mouse click” box (or left click, depending on your mouse setup) and change the vertical slider to -30. Do the same with Axis6(<0), but set the vertical movement slider to +30.

Now when you move the right stick, it will emulate you right clicking and dragging–i.e. looking up and down. I was personally not able to get key commands for pageup/pagedown type camera control to work. This mouse solution is fine as long as your mouse pointer is not hovering over a skill, which will actually cause a click on it instead of a mouselook drag.

Step 8: Now click the “preferences” at the top of the JoyToKey window and select “Associate Config Files With Applications.” You’ll need to click Add, enter a name for the app (i.e. Rift Client), the name of the config file you just created (i.e. Rift config 1), and the path to your Rift.exe. (Editor’s note: I have actually tested this in both Rift and LotRO, and this preference is not necessary. The controller will simply work on whatever window is in focus without setting an association.)

Step 9: Log in. You should magically be good to go. If you’re not, then I can only assure you that I know how you feel. If you ask in comments, it’s possible that I or someone else can help. Of course, if anyone has any brilliant insights or clarifications to help with this topic, I’d love to hear it.

Disclaimer: I have used this successfully now on two different computers, with no bad effects or viruses, with both systems scanned and monitored by Norton. I am not affiliated at all with this software, and cannot be held responsible for any damage that may occur for any reason. This blog post is just a help doc. As of fall 2012, MotionInJoy makes an internet connection mandatory so it can open ads and even a browser window on you. This is obviously plain bad. I am considering an XBOX controller, but for now I’ve disabled javascript and graphics on default-browser Firefox and have begun to use Chrome as my go-to. I’m then at less risk for applications opening my default browser to something unwanted.

Further reading:

NEW: I have created a printable template for mapping out your PS3 controller to a PC game. Download the template ZIP file and open the BMP (windows bitmap) image in Windows Paint or other graphics program. It should be ready to print on one 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. Here is a sample of using the template to remember where all of your skills are mapped, in this case for a LotRO Warden.

Using MotionInJoy (same link as above)
More guidance on using MotionInJoy.
Revora.net, more on JoyToKey

Feel The Rift Love

Trion released a video trailer today for its big wedding feature event on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, during which the Rift MMO will try to break the record for virtual marriages in 24 hours. The trailer heaps so much love (relatively) on LGBT players that I’m left a little bit speechless.

A lot could be said. I suppose a thanks could be appropriate in light of SWTOR pulling gay and lesbian romances right before launch. Go Trion, and long live Rift. *raises a champagne glass*. Here’s the video on Youtube. Discussion at Massively.

I just want to show a still from the video here on the blog to sort of enjoy the moment and celebrate the beauty of strong Bahmi women at the same time. If you haven’t gone Bahmi, you don’t know what you’re missing. If you haven’t played Rift, you don’t know what you’re missing either. There is a newbie guide here on this blog to help you get started.

Hitler, Rift, And What Class To Pick

Something we like to do here at KittyKitty is to collect information and links in one online place for later reference, and a bunch of videos kind of floated into the radar this week, so here you go.

Rift

These videos mixing Hitler and Rift may or may not be funny, depending on your perspective. Note they also contain quite a lot of F-bombs and other language that may be offensive to people. A thread posted in the Rift forums by Haristo, one of the authors, tipped us off today to these.

Hitler Opens A PvP Rift.
Hitler finds out Rift is better than WoW.
Hitler finds out Mages were nerfed again.

SWTOR

For something more wholesome, MMOGamerChick made a list a few days ago of the videos for the eight SWTOR base classes.

The “Fem-Shep” Trooper class (voiced by Jennifer Hale, the same as the female Shepard from Mass Effect) is pretty compelling from the voice alone as well as the big guns, but it would be weird hearing Fem-Shep in a different context. Yes? On the other hand, Force lightning is hard to resist. It’s just plain sexy. So…the Sith Inquisitor video kind of blew me away. It almost isn’t surprising that this class has been leading popularity polls by a wide margin for quite a while.

The Smuggler is at the back of the pack in that linked poll, making it look like the Smuggler is an underdog class. One of the Bioware writers singled out the Smuggler in an interview (with a grin on his face) as having a really wild ride for a story. How will the class mechanics (i.e. cover) work out in practice? This could be one of those little-played, much-appreciated classes.

Remember that each class in SWTOR splits later into one of two advanced classes, which is another consideration. Last I’ve heard, you can’t change your advanced class once chosen, but the ability to do so is still in consideration by Bioware. Your advanced class plays no role in your overall class story.

Guild Wars 2

A crop of new, high-quality Guild Wars 2 videos have also surfaced in the past few days, including the same type of class/race video show-offs as the ones above for SWTOR. You can check them out in HD at Gametrailers.

Rift State Of The Game–Hartsman Waxes Enthusiastic

I mean “waxes” in the poetic meaning, of course. The man is good-looking, but I don’t know if he’s that metro. So.

Today we received a major double-scoop of epic Rift news. This afternoon Massively reported on a Rift presentation on the state of the game, which was a bunch of reading in itself. This evening, Hartsman seems to have posted the same information, but in the extended form of an epic novel.

You can just tell that the producer of Rift is excited about his game, and that excitement is contagious. On top of that, Hartsman starts off by recognizing the community and the support of the players. Even more remarkable is that this news, as well as recent patches, basically sing “we heard you” to the community.

I’m speechless. Really.

It’s interesting that Hartsman recognizes how abrupt and confusing hitting 50 and Rift is. It’s true. Which is why the L50 guide here on my blog quickly surpassed my newbie guide, despite my L50 guide not being officially listed or linked anywhere, that I know of. People are getting it from Google and my forum signature.

I really like the sound of the new CHRONICLES OF TELARA instances.

We’ve also been working on ways to get a similar sense of involvement with key story characters, and new key areas, in a way that’s available to more people.

The story involvement with world events is a good first step here, but we think there’s even more we can do. Chronicles of Telara are solo/small group instances that get everyone involved with key characters and villains in the worlds’ ongoing story.

These sound kind of like the LotRO story instances called session play, which are really fun and popular, where you can live through important events in the history of the lore. I don’t know if Time Travel or playing as an NPC will be involved here or not, but the focus on solo, story, and lore here will fill some real content gaps that players have been complaining about.

Most of all, this State of the Game shows that Trion appreciates and intends to cater to all types of players, not just raiders. This is a big deal, and I’m even more glad now that I resubscribed (and bought a second account). There are so many amazing places Rift can go from here.

Trion seems like the Cirque Du Soleil of MMO developers. You never know what they are going to do next, but there’s a good chance it’s going to be something awesome and eye-opening. They don’t want keep doing the same-old, despite how much of it they’ve done. Free, easy, and painless self-serve server transfers in-game? Are you kidding me?

Additional reading: PC Gamer Article.

The Soapbox Talks Sex — Treatment Of Females In MMO’s

Eliot Lefebvre unleashed a relatively impassioned soapbox piece on Massively this week.

I agreed right away on the example of Rockstar as a developer that tends to be sexist. I’ve commented on this before here on my blog. I really wish Rockstar would get with the program and let us play a female protagonist.

Based on poll numbers I’ve seen for other games, I would guess 50% of players might play as a female, with 30% as a real preference. Googling to test my guess, I find a poll on the All Points Bulletin forum that shows nearly 50% would make a female character, for example. Other polls for open-world single player games like Oblivion are far more favorable in terms of actual female players.

Infer what you will. I’ll just keep lamenting that Red Dead Redemption made me play (or rather not play, and send the DVD back to Gamefly) as a male. I could have been in a world of gun-toting cowgirl joy.

It’s very complicated, of course, but surely given the enormous amount of investment to make a game, asking for equal treatment in voice over, cutscenes, and romances isn’t asking too much.

In the above pic that I cut from a Rift screenshot, you can see the treatment of women in Rift. I really don’t have a problem with this Ethian-style desert dweller look, although the shoulder guards here are just plain awful. I also don’t have a problem with this sexualized fantasy art style, which has been a cultural norm since Frazetta, Vallejo, and Royo.

My logic breaks down, however, as the Massively article and Spinksville point out, because of the huge non-equity. If loincloths are the going style for the Defiant culture, then the men should be wearing them too.

I should be seeing oiled gladiator pectorals shining in the sun, just like I see in the art of the above-mentioned venerable fantasy art standard-bearers. Instead, we see full suits of armor. And then you’ve got Shyla, queen of the high elves, who fights in her panties.