Perpetually Bored

For the entire weekend, starting Friday night until Sunday night, I did absolutely nothing but play Bad Company 2, and I feel great about it. No looking for group for hours, no putting up with people who make a nuisance of themselves, but pure fire fights from the moment I wake till my brain cells die on me, and my eyes and neck scream bloody murder.

I’ve not mindlessly lost myself in such intensive rounds of a game for perhaps more than two years, since the local Battlefield 2 community died out. I enjoyed every bit of this weekend, and I’m ready to do it all over again the next, and the one after.

I find myself unable to game casually. For me, it’s all the way or not at all. Having being turned down from a few raiding guilds on Najena, I find it hard to swallow the feelings of rejection and turn to one of the more casual ones.

Being able to excel and achieve is an important goal for me, not just in a game, but anything else I do. This is the same reason that allows me to dedicate myself to one particular game and nothing else for years. I’d much rather succeed at one than be mediocre at a few. The sense of achievement and accomplishment are huge motivators in my gameplay. When the chances of them start diminishing, I find myself rapidly lose interesting in the game concerned.

What’s your playstyle?

Over the course of last weekend, I hit Lvl 90 and moved to the Najena server. Najena has a good fraction of population that are Australians, who has a rather similar timezone to mine. It’s about two to three hours ahead of me in Sydney, depending on if Daylight Savings Time is in effect. That was the motivating factor behind my move. I had hoped to be able to get groups on the nights that I do come home from base and perhaps even raid some.

Now that I’m over here on Najena, I’m disappointed and find myself regretting my move. The (low) frequency of groups hasn’t changed compared to being on Antonia Bayle. Despite there being a little more chatter in the channels during my evenings, I wasn’t getting into any groups at all. On the raiding front, although there are number of guilds that do carry out raids in the evenings, compared to zero on AB, none of them seems too keen on recruiting a Wizard. I’m stubborn though, and I love my class. I’ve been playing a Wizard since launch, and I’m not going to reroll to a class that is greater in demand. Logging in and staring at my screen for the next couple of hours depresses me.

I find myself in a bit of bind. I love the game, but I’m caught in a stagnant position and there doesn’t seem to be any way that I can improve my character. With groups being hard to find and raiding opportunities almost non-existent for me, I’m cut off from a good part of the game’s content. My passion for Everquest 2 only goes so far before I  start to question my next month’s subscription and source for other avenues of entertainment.

Has anyone noticed that the con system in Sentinel’s Fate is extremely unpredictable? There are some single ^ named mobs that have a ton of HP and are able to beat the crap out of me, such as the Forlorn Drake in Toxxulia Forest, despite me being able to solo a number of ^^ or ^^^ named heroics just fine. On the other hand, some of the Epic x4s in The Hole can be easily one-grouped, and there are even Epic x2s in some group instances.

Isn’t the whole point of the con system to provide a the player with a feedback of the estimated difficulty of the mob? While some over and under-cons are are typically the case, they don’t deviate too far from the expected margins. This is drastic.

I figured that since everyone would be busy questing away trying to level, I’d attempt to snag a few discoveries from tradeskilling. I was able to get most of the server-wide discoveries for the level 80 – 82 Provisioner crafts, making an adventure level in the process too from all the mobs I had to kill while harvesting. I had to leave for work then, and when I returned, I was twelve hours behind. All that can be discovered had been discovered by then.

That was when I started going through the adventure quests and exploring. The land mass is huge, and although I did enjoy the view offered while traveling on the NPC mounts from point to point initially, the long duration of the travel soon became rather irksome. I got annoyed, I got impatient. The disc-shaped mounts looked fantastic though, and riding on them reminded me of my Magus in Warhammer Online.

Taking the advise of the public, I found my way into a Hole group, where I experienced the fastest leveling I’ve ever done in EQ2. My group found a spot where large encounters of mobs constantly spawn, and with very little respawn time inbetween too. With full vitality and a 55% experience potion, I went from level 82 to 85 in about two hours. I finally understood the reason behind the significant amounts of level 90s I’ve seen in game barely a day after launch. There’s been much debate over whether the high amount of exp given by the group mobs in the Hole are intended  or a result of some mathematical formula gone wild. Either way, now that the game has already been launched in such a fashion, it’s too late to ponder over if which was the desired outcome but accept the situation as it is.

Asides from the whole international cd key fiasco, launch day went by very well. The server came up on time, and remained up. Performance was also good, despite the heavier load. I think the development and members of the IT team did a really good job with the load balancing and scaling.

I’m thankful that I didn’t have to experience any of the issues that the intentional player base is experience trying to obtain keys for Sentinel’s Fate, due to me winning a copy of the game from the trivia Stargrace held on Twitter yesterday. Hugs to you Stargrace, I’m eternally grateful.

In the history of EQ2 expansion launches, this one has to be the worst. The sites that SOE partnered with either didn’t accept orders from specific countries, or ran out of keys in the case of DLGamer (who also refused to accept Singapore purchases, btw). Worse still, DLGamer heavily oversold and accepted the money of players even though they did not have the products to back it up.  When Kiara visited the #EQ2 IRC channel on ZAM during the hours leading up to launch, she was faced with an anger mob of international gamers, who were out to lynch.

Despite me sharing many similar sentiments as the players who were not able to obtain the game, I felt that Kiara was being treated unfairly. Without her, it is possible that no international customer would have even been able to play on launch day itself. Rather, the responsibility for the whole fiasco lies with the invisible people in upper echelon of SOE’s management, the cold businessmen in suits. At the end of the day, the international community still constitutes a sizable force in the playerbase and there’s no reason to treat them as second-rate customers just because they do not live in North America.

I still have not quite figured out how I am going to obtain Sentinal’s Fate on launch day yet. Kiara mentioned over at the community forums that the marketing team has been working on allowing international customers to purchase Sentinal’s Fate digitally on launch day. The idea of delaying digital orders until a week after launch is a poor marketing decision, and flies against all logic. While most companies are looking to champion digital distribution as a means  for rapidly distributing their products without the messy and cumbersome logistical lines, implementing an artificial  delay seems to foolish.

I think SOE did realize that,  and made some noble efforts to amend that decision. However, at the time of this writing, none of the pre-order sites catered for international customers seem to be accepting orders from Singapore. DLGamer seemed to offer it, until I attempted to pay for it, and there wasn’t a single payment option listed for my country.

Sentinal’s Fate is still not listed on Steam yet. Hopefully it accepts my order there, otherwise it looks like I’m getting screwed. Sigh.

I’ve been rather skeptical about modern shooters, ever since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 disappointed. Over dinner yesterday, I questioned a friend whom I have noticed been playing Battlefield: Bad Company lately on Steam on how the game was.

The predecessor, Battlefield 2, was a fantastic game, up until version 1.5 or so, where they added in air-dropped vehicles. That was a step in the wrong direction, and it made a mess out of my beloved game. Waning interest in the game saw the number of servers in my region vanish, and I was forced to quit.

Initially, I wasn’t too impressed. My friend then directed me to a number of gameplay videos on Youtube, one of which featured the destructive environment. A recon trooper went into the objective building, placed a number a C4 charges, and lured a number of enemy in. The recon trooper promptly ran out, and set off the C4, physically demolishing the entire building. This wasn’t just an explosion in the building, but rather, the entire building was brought down and collapsed on the enemy within.

I was sold. I had never envisioned the day where a game would feature such extensive, physics-driven destructible environment. There have been promises over the years, and destructible environment was first introduced and featured in the 2001 game, Red Faction. The implementation however, was very limited. You could fire enough rockets to blast a hole through a wall, but you couldn’t bring the wall down, much less an entire building.

In the next few years, destructible and interactive environments would slowly be featured in tech demo after tech demo, but no one was able to develop a fully marketable product out of it. Then came Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter in 2006 which allowed for physics driven explosions if you had a PhysX card. This was followed by Crysis and Far Cry 2 which included more destructible objections. Flora  shifted as you move through them, and you could mow down some.

Now, in Battlefield Bad Company, you can reduce an entire building to rubble. Realistic physics and destructible environment sure has come a long a way since 2001. It was a slow development process, but we’re there at last. You’re getting my $49.90 on this one, EA.

It all made sense as to why the Collectors were going around planets and star systems kidnapping the human population the moment I saw this. In Terminator Salvation, Skynet went around harvesting humans in order to skin them for their T-800 terminators. The Collectors were simply doing it on a much larger scale, for their supersized terminator.

The Alliance and/or Cerberus better have a plan for the security of Shepard’s mom.

Despite my initial rants about controls of Mass Effect 2, I’ve been able to overlook it and have grown to like the game to the point of addiction. I started on a new character this week, rerolling just after the start of the suicide mission, which puts my first run at about 75% complete. I had messed up my chances of entering into a romantic relationship with Miranda (tip: always choose a pro-Cerberus option when talking to her, especially in the scene when both of you are sitting on the bed), and I wouldn’t have that. Not only do I fail at romances in real life, but even in a largely scripted video game, I didn’t stand a chance either. Sigh.

In traditional RPGs, the amount of influence your character exerts over the rest of the party is usually represented by a numerical score. Not in Mass Effect 2. There isn’t an obvious way to tell how much a particular member of your crew likes you, although some might argue that not representing a quantifiable figure for a relationship might be more in the realm of reality.

As I advance in Mass Effect 2, I begin to find that the game draws multiple parallels to various Sci-Fi universes. An especially obvious one for me was that of Stargate. The Collectors seem to imitate that of the Wraith. Even the layout of one of the Collector ships mimics that of the Wraith’s Hive ships with the layout of captive pods along the entire interior hull. Similarly, when embarking on Tali’s personal mission and listening to her explaining about the Geth their history with the Quarians, it seemed exactly like that of the Asgard and their creations, the replicators. Additionally, the Geth also resembled the replicators in that they’re about to rebuild from splintered parts.

I brought the similarities up merely as an observation, and not as a stance against Mass Effect 2. On the contrary, I enjoyed the melding of various elements of Sci-fi seamlessly into the Mass Effect universe. I hardly think of it as a rip-off at all because if it were considered as such, every other Sci-Fi and fantasy game would be equally guilty. As Joseph Campbell documented in his book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, every heroic and epic story follows more or less similar curves.

Back to Mass Effect 2.