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.

Same Gender Romance Coming Soon To SWTOR?

Larry Everett made a very eye-opening prediction today about same-gender romances coming in SWTOR: Rise of the Hutt Cartel. This was on Massively in his article, Hyperspace Beacon: What does the future hold for SWTOR?

I was having the same exact thoughts today, but with the additional observation that the Hutt species is hermaphroditic, that is, they have sex organs from both genders hiding somewhere on their big slug-like bodies.

What better time to introduce the enjoyment of love in all possible forms, including droid love? I would think droids are also hermaphroditic, with various interchangeable modules–okay I don’t want to go too far with this, but if there are any droids out there with power supplies that last longer than normal batteries, look me up.

I can also say that a LotRO kinmate on the Landroval server said in our kin forum last July 2nd that her friend is a lead writer for SWTOR, and that she “Just talked to my friend and he confirms that there is definitely some same-sex content coming down the pipe for SWOTR. He can’t say when, but it’s confirmed.”

I think quality companionship is a really big deal in an RPG. It doesn’t even have to be romance. It can be a faction. It can be friends. The party banter in Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age is much-beloved because it adds so much to immersion and characterization.

I’ve only played Skyrim for six hours (so glad I waited for my new PC–it’s the best-looking game I’ve seen), but I’m already impressed by the characters and how they try to recruit me into their factions. The world of Skyrim is so amazing so far.

Anyway. Here is the relevant text from the Massively article, and behold my newest artwork creation as well, in the form of a quirky comic strip.

“Since the announcement that SWTOR would continue the BioWare tradition of romantic story arcs in TOR, players have been curious (no pun intended) about whether same-gender options would be available and how they might play out within the existing character storylines. I certainly believe that Rise of the Hutt Cartel will bring us the SGRAs we’re looking for.

I’ll even speculate that the arcs will be similar to those in Mass Effect 3. I don’t believe that suddenly every romance arc will be available to you regardless of gender. I believe that certain characters, possibly existing companions (Kaliyo, I’m looking at you), will have a change of heart, as it were, and make themselves available for players to romance now.

However, I think the biggest area for SGRAs will be in brand-new characters introduced on Makeb. These characters will be orientated one specific way, and if your character is the same gender, then you will be able to romance them. Additionally, I believe we will receive a new companion — maybe two. This companion will be gained much as we acquired HK-51: There will be a shared story arc for every class to gain this companion, and I believe this companion will be completely romanceable. ~Larry Everett

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.

Building A Seaworthy Vessel Bound For The Secret World

One of the largest collections of Salvador Dali art in the world is found in the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. This is an amazing collection of paintings and history that is worth a visit if you’re in the Tampa area.

The largest painting in the St. Petersburg collection (or it used to be, anyway) is The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, which is a magnificent surrealist painting over 14 feet high, full of symbolism and historical and religious references.

For gamers, discovery and exploration is a big part of our enjoyment of games, and I’ve really been wanting to explore The Secret World. So I set forth with my credit card (things are easier these days than in the fifteenth century) on Columbus Day (it’s a New World thing, for you European readers) a few weeks ago.

I went to the CyberpowerPC website. I prayed for deliverance from my current computer’s sins. I prayed for forgiveness for my gross first world excess and I ordered a new gaming machine. It was delivered yesterday. (I’m not a big fan of the word rig. “Rig” seems to be applied to computers as a man-power term, as if referring to a big gnarly boat motor.)

I took advantage of a holiday sale that looks fairly typical for CyberpowerPC. I decided that I couldn’t really build the computer myself for less than they’d do it for me, plus give me a warranty. I had to have Intel of course, and I also got my first real video card, a Radeon HD7850, which is twice as powerful as my old 5770.

I don’t really need that much power as a non-hardcore, rarely-raiding gamer, but I do like ultra-high resolution textures because they make my outfits look good. And the trees, which are important since I mainly play elves. So.

I admit that the real reason for getting this now wasn’t The Secret World–it was Windows 8, its app-focused design, and the Windows store at launch where you can buy the extras you want for extra cash. Supposedly there is also a non-removable Microsoft watermark on the desktop–per some forum guy. So DLC at launch and corporate interests built into the interface, unchangeable. Sounds like games these days, except it’s your operating system.

Who knows–Windows 8 may well be great, and I’ll upgrade. Windows 7 now installed, moving on. My old computer with the AMD dual core 2.0 GHz CPU is a champ, but I’m sure she’s as happy that she is retiring as I am. See the pic below–that’s called “cable spaghetti”, I think. Yes, that’s really a bare internal hard drive sticking out of the front because it wouldn’t fit.

My new ark has proved seaworthy out of the box. I pushed LotRO to ultra settings, and I don’t think this computer even noticed. I love the HAF 912 case. The free Razer keyboard and mouse are functional and fine, but I’m not sure if I’ll be using them as my go-to units when I set sail for The Secret World this winter.

Forth, Eorlingas! For the Illuminati!

Old, Trusty HP Computer:

New Computer Of Wonders +5:

Rohan Kudos

I’m really enjoying Rohan so far. I proudly wore my hand-painted Rohan stud earrings to work on Monday. I finished them Sunday afternoon. I did some Gondorian white tree earrings a few weeks ago.

Rohan is a beautiful wide-open landscape that you might expect, but with the usual evil, marauding enemy warbands that are tracked for you on the mini-map. Those would be targets for ye olde mounted combat.

The NPC’s are especially well-characterized through the writing, a little more than the dwarves were for Moria, maybe. The Chance Thomas music is also a stately affair that reminds me that I’m playing a successful, top-tier MMO. Yes, familiarity can sometimes breed a lack of proper respect.

I was mainly inspired to write this post to give kudos for a little thing: the new female gender kinship titles. This was a player request in the forums during previous months, and Turbine delivered. Per the official patch notes, “Male-gendered kinship titles now have female-gendered counterparts. If you are a female Lord, your title will now be Lady, if you were a female Caun, your title will now be an Aranel, etc.”

This is a warm fuzzy. Sometimes it’s the little things. I’m curious what some of the other titles will turn into. Will female hobbit leaders still just be “chiefs”? Will the Man kinship “Master” turn into “Mistress”? Yes, please!

So. I’ve been so busy with updating and fixing my Elven Adventuress interface elements that I’ve yet to get further than the warhorse proving grounds, which is where I got during beta before my accident and broken shoulder put me out of gaming.

If I had to pick one thing I really like so far about Rohan, it’s the writing. At my audience with the Thane of Langhold, I noticed the writers taking a page from Bioware’s ego-stroking playbook. Frankly, a little respect pleases this adventuress. He didn’t even make me fetch sticks or truck supplies around!

Thane of Langhold: “Ah…the famous wandering Champion! Your reputation precedes you, Beldamire. I bid you welcome to Langhold. I am sure you will find plenty to keep you busy here, for we are beset by ruffians and wild creatures.”

Ah yes, the sound of a classic call to adventure, and I don’t even need a full voice-over to hear it loud and clear, which is the way J.R.R. Tolkien also did things. Based on everything I’ve seen and heard, Turbine deserves a lot of praise and dollars for this fine effort, and I hope they get them.

Playing Saint’s Row 3 As A Vampire (Roleplay)

I’ve jumped into four new campaigns in single-player games over the last few weeks: Vampire Bloodlines, Torchlight 2, Saint’s Row The Third, and Dungeon Siege 3. Saint’s Row emerged as the surprise winner of my free time after I discovered the Bloodsucker DLC. I can play Saint’s Row as a vampire while waiting for Riders of Rohan.

I know. This sounds like absurd silliness for an over-the-top game, but a vampire character can explain all of the aspects of Saint’s Row 3 that are silly, making it perfect for a zany roleplayer. Bear with me. I’ll explain in the bullet points below, but first let me explain the origins of the idea, and why I bought yucky DLC in the first place.

I’m not a fan of DLC. If I buy a single-player game, I want to play a discrete, “complete” game. I almost never play DLC. A little extra chunk of content often isn’t worth the inflated price, the download, the install process, and re-playing the game.

For Saint’s Row 3 though, DLC works because the next sequel is coming next year, and the SR3 DLC is mostly over at this point. You can get it now all at once. In fact, their most recent mini-expansion content, “Enter the Dominatrix” is being rolled into the next game instead of being released as DLC, and THQ is now releasing a new complete/GOTY edition titled “The Full Package” this November.

I downloaded Saint’s Row The Third from Steam a few weeks ago and played the free promotion. I played the standard game a few hours, and I was thinking all the while–this would be a great vampire game! The scrolling city street on the start menu screen even has a tribute to Troika’s Vampire: Bloodlines–a “Smiling Jack Diner” on the left side. (Bloodlines is a classic older game that I’d recommend to anyone, if you can get it to run.)

So I decided to buy the game because it was full of guilty sub-machine gun pleasure, and I noticed in Steam that they had a vampire DLC called the Bloodsucker Pack. You can also purchase werewolf and zombie costume-type DLC, but the vampire deal is a little better because it gives you a feeding power. You can grab a human shield and suck their blood to heal.

To be honest, I’ll be the first to mourn the conversion of the Saint’s Row franchise from a gritty gangland roleplay into silliness with shark guns, vampires, werewolves, and pink ninjas, but they are letting me create and play a female character, and that’s almost mandatory for me to play the game in the first place. The Mafia franchise has a lock on gritty realism and integrity anyway, almost like Saint’s Row’s schizophrenic opposite.

The great thing is that in Saint’s Row, you don’t play some man-hunk that the devs have selected to tell their story like in so many other games these days. You play the character you want, and people just call you “boss”, which is brilliant. I like that respect from my underlings. Saint’s Row character creation is also better than most MMOs. (The breast slider of course is par excellence, as the French say.) You can also choose your character’s voice actor and animations, which is a very rare roleplay-friendly feature.

On that note, let’s talk about playing Saint’s Row as a vampire, and how roleplaying a vampire can completely explain game mechanics that otherwise makes no sense, even bad AI from the NPCs. I’ll just make a list and prove it to you! Prepare yourself for a hailfire of roleplayer imagination, a vampire gang manifesto.

Saint’s Row Mechanics, A Vampire Explains That:

Regeneration. This is a big immersion-breaker in Saint’s Row. Your character regenerates health like a D&D troll on crack, as long as you can get some separation from the heat of combat. This is supposedly a feature to increase fun at the expense of realism. You just need to hide behind a dumpster and rest, then you’re good to get back in the battle. Guess what? Vampires regenerate like trolls on crack.

Ability To Absorb Enormous Damage. This is another immersion-breaker in Saint’s Row. You can take a lot of bullets without any ill effects. You can even purchase more raw damage resistance as you level up! As with regeneration, playing as a vampire explains that perfectly. In fact, the ability given with the Bloodsucker Pack allows you to heal up in combat if you play very well, without having to run, hide, and wait for regeneration. Vampires rarely have to do that. They suck blood and commit mass violence, just like your character in Saint’s Row.

Immortal. You can take dozens of bullets and a grenade and hit the floor in this game, and your homie (follower), if alive, can simply “revive” you. You get back up and keep fighting. Obviously the enemy didn’t take time to put a stake through you.

Not-So-Smart Humans. The hostile NPCs in Saint’s Row sometimes stand there and hesitate before they pull the trigger, or they’ll end up a couple feet away from you and not react to you immediately. Vampires widely have a power of Presence (awe), that can compel humans to stand and drool, at least for a few seconds. Human AI behavior in Saint’s Row can be explained this way.

Your Businesses Are Safe Zones. It’s silly to be able to run into a business you own and erase all faction hate/aggro, including that of the police, but that’s how Saint’s Row rolls. They don’t have much surround-the-house or search-for-the-suspect programming. Since there is no way to roleplay a Masquerade in Saint’s Row, the concept of a vampire code of morality is out. After all, feeding on humans kills them, which is unacceptable in itself. The only explanation is that you’ve built secret safe rooms under your businesses, and entering the buildings effectively hides you there thanks to your complicitous, mind-influenced employees. You learn very early in the game that the police are corrupt and bought out, anyway.

The Lore And Environment:

The Saint’s Row 3 campaign is similar to its predecessors in that you go to war against one gang at a time, defeating gang leader bosses with the progression of the storyline. The story fails a little bit, however, at making it feel like there is much at stake. It doesn’t make it personal enough to your character, which is the golden key to a good story.

The answer is to re-frame the gang leaders as your personal rivals. They are immortals just like you–trying to beat you and rule the world. Yes, that’s Highlander, the movie. It works. Why are all the humans crazy in this game anyway, mindlessly roaming the sidewalks and crashing into you with their cars? Because one of your rivals is sowing chaos through mental realm, of course, causing the city to descend into madness and dementia. Yes, that’s a Malkavian vampire power. Are we there yet?

There is no visible clock in Saint’s Row 3 to manage day and night, but the times of day do change. There is no night cheat either, and of course you’re not going to die or burn in sunlight. To daywalk, dark glasses and a hat should be mandatory at least, or you can use a weather cheat, entered via the phone: “overcast”, “lightrain”, “heavyrain”.

Your car windows should all be tinted dark, with no sunroof, and “The Blood” radio channel is recommended. There is a kinky/bondage shop in the game that sells some appropriate Gothic-style clothing, because vampires are sexy, darling, like Vodka. And that’s all she wrote, because this blog is rated “T” for teen. Saint’s Row The Third is not.

Torchlight 2 Release Date And Launch Trailer

I like underdog games. I like games that cost $20. I like games that run and look great on my old HP machine with its rattly fans and plaque-hardened arteries. I like games that let you play offline. I like games that don’t feature a real money transaction design, at the cost of the game’s integrity, for the sole purpose of profit for the developer.

Runic games announced a release date for Torchlight 2 today (Sept. 20), and with the announcement comes a really nice launch trailer (below). This trailer was so inspiring, I thought why not post it here on KittyKitty.

The new bi-gendered classes are wonderfully welcome, just like in Diablo 3, which all things considered I don’t really desire to play. (I did complete D1, D2, and Lord of Destruction.) I got a little bit into the original Torchlight–enough adventure to be intrigued by the successor, which is greatly huger than the original. I’ll be buying Torchlight 2.

More reading:

Official Site.
TAGN’s comparison Diablo 3 vs. Torchlight 2.
Torchlight 1 vs. Torchlight 2 Comparison Graphic.

Girls With Dragon Tattoos

I’ve been snarking about the over-use of dragons in video games lately. Dragon Age. Dragon’s Dogma. Skyrim. Guild Wars 2. WoW players recently finished off Deathwing in their Dragon Soul raid. Even LotRO recently put in another dragon raid with Isengard.

In WoW, you’re a scrub if you aren’t riding around on a dragon, and with the new revamp to Refer-A-Friend, dragon shape-shifting is still more in vogue (it was available before via the Archaeology hobby. Those poor archaelogists–they could have just referred a friend instead of spending hundreds of hours trying to get the Vial of Sands.)

I was recently looking at a video of a coming Asian action offering (the name escapes me) that shoe-horned dragons into their game in a way that made me flat out laugh.

Dragons are beyond the point of trite and overused. Rift is maybe the exception. Their big bosses are of course more dragons, but taken to an extreme of being extra-planar gods. You can’t argue with that being kind of cool.

When I saw the image above, I thought of another exception–an MMO that lets all players play as dragons. Something like that would be a mold-breaker. The point is to give dragons back their dignity. They’ve totally lost it as raid fodder and WoW mounts–whether rampaging or cute and tamed, they are still pimped for dollars. Even the dragons in Rift border on caricatures when you boil the lore and presentation down.

So. An MMO with a playable dragon race on the verge of extinction. A view from the other side with liberal irony and humor. Unfortunately the name World of Dragons is taken. The devs will have to think of something else (sigh).

LotRO has dragons. It just needs tattoos now. I support the suggestion threads on this. Criticisms tend to involve tattoos “not belonging” in LotRO, or “they don’t exist in Middle-Earth.” Both of those arguments are wrong.

The “not belonging” argument comes from a prejudice of tattoos born largely from the spectrum of modern American culture. I’m not a history buff on this, but I know full well that Japanese and some primitive cultures took a sacred stance towards tattoo, taking body modification into a level of ritual and rite of passage.

The primitive cultures of LotRO do have tattoos, including facial tattoos. I can’t remember if there was a quest text about them. So to those who say they don’t exist in Middle-Earth, have you played LotRO lately?

If you’re wondering where these tattoos are, check a few pics here. For more LotRO eye candy, VG247 posted some nice new Rohan pics yesterday.