There’s a queue for everything

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Calreth

The Absurd. This is what I got while trying to read the patch notes yesterday.

There a few things about SWTOR the seems rather backwards. In a time when Rift is able do large content patches with downtime as little as an hour, SWTOR’s minor patch took a whole 6 hours. And it got extended. During that period of time, even trying to look at something as trivial as patch notes was difficult as their web servers seem to be overloaded as well.

There’s no doubt that SWTOR is a fun game, but there’s the dark side of it too. Support has been a horror story so far, with people unable to get through to a CSR after holding for hours on a phone.

I hope the support woes and long maintenance window is a genuine problem caused by the game doing too well, rather than an indication of things to come.

A New Hope

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Calreth

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.

With Han Solo’s wise words in mind, so begun the journey of Calreth the Bounty Hunter.

I’ve been cautiously hesitant about trying Star Wars: The Old Republic because I wasn’t sure the MMORPG genre had any more tricks up its sleeves. There seems to have been a virtual worlds slum of late, with a number of games failing to reach the critical mass required to sustain a profitable business and instead switching to a F2P model.

After a few hours of playtime, SWTOR feels refreshing. The unmistakable underpinnings of an MMO are there, but the world feels different. Perhaps I’ve been so used to fantasy games that the sci-fi atmosphere is a welcome change, but it gave me reason to want to explore.

The storytelling has the hallmarks of BioWare written all over it, although watching a cut scene for every "<$verb> <$num_of> <$mob_name>" quests felt tiresome at some points and I found myself skipping through them, just as I would click pass quest dialogues in other game.

I found the morality, i.e. light side(LS)/dark side(DS), choices rather well presented. For one quest, I was tasked to steal and recharge power sources from a scrap yard for a family struggling to get by. However, the foreman I was stealing from begged me to stop, else the owner would punish him for doing a poor job. Both needs seemed equally fair, and it was a real dilemma. The more common morality choice comes in the form of being tasked to kill or steal from a person, only to have the person trying to buy you off or even sabotaging the quest giver. In this second dilemma, the LS/DS choices are less obvious. Typically, the game awards you LS points for choosing not to kill the target, and DS points for killing the target. I often find myself disagreeing with which choices reflected LS/DS in these cases. You’re not exactly a “good” person by accepting someone’s call for help, and then screwing the person over.

Roleplaying a bounty hunter, my general rule of thumb is to always accomplish the task set forth by my employer. It wouldn’t be good for business, reputation, or even my own survival to upset my employer.

I love the bounty hunter mechanics, especially the heat system. Whenever you use a skill that’s stronger than the your standard laser blast, say a firing a missile or a charged shot, you build up a certain amount of heat. At 100 heat points, you can’t use another skill that generates heat until your current heat level dissipates. The default rate of dissipating seems to be around 5 heat/s, and you get a skill which is on a 2 mins cooldown that lets you instantly vent 50 units of heat. This reminds me fondly of the times playing MechWarrior where I would fire all my weapons, overheat and perform an emergency vent while the mech’s computer shuts down for a few minutes.

I wonder how long would SWTOR retain my interest. It is very single player orientated, although you do occasionally get a group, albeit short, quest. There isn’t that feel of a living breathing world, but rather that of a single player game with an IRC channel that people idle in. There’s the occasional LFGs and the “my class is gimp” chatter, but it’s comparatively quiet than during most of the other MMO launches. Or perhaps the people who’ve gotten the game a week earlier had already all beaten it and moved on. Who knows?

Whether I’ll be playing SWTOR a month from now, it’s still too early to tell. Much is clouded by the dark side of the force.

Back to Morrowind

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Calreth

Now that I’ve sent Alduin back to wherever dragons go to die, it’s time to revisit an old love.

Morrowind.

When I last played Morrowind, I was in secondary school. I was one of the few people that had a graphics card which supported programmable pixel shaders, and was immediately blown away by the water in Morrowind. I’ve never seen such realistic water textures before, not even in John Carmack’s games. I was hooked. Morrowind became the first non-MMORPG game that I played full day to the exclusivity of all other games for a period of months. (Confession: I didn’t even know what an MMO was then.)

Right after I finished up most of Skyrim (45/50 completion if you go by the achievement metric), I installed Morrowind and set about creating a new character. Soon, Calreth, a level 1 Breton Nightblade, born under the sign of the Shadow, was wandering the streets of Seyda Neen.

If you thought Skyrim was huge, prepare to have your socks blown off. Putting Skyrim and Morrrowind side-by-side, Skyrim feels more of a theme-park than open-world game. Forget all you’ve experienced in RPGs in the last 5 years, this is ye olde RPG with no safety rails. There’s no compass with places of interest marked on them, nor big exclamation marks on the heads of NPCs vying for your attention. Even the map is initially shrouded in a fog of war. You pay attention to quest dialogues, because that’s all the hints you’re going to get. If an NPC tells you he lost his ring in the marshlands south of the city, reachable if you exit, take two lefts, follow the river south until you get a wooden bridge, and then go right, you had better remember that. There is a quest journal in diary form, and even that doesn’t show you immediately which quests you are on and how many stages there are. Perhaps the biggest indicator that you’re not playing a 2010 game anymore is the combat system. Regenerative health and mana system are for boys. Real men don’t need frigging auto-regen.

Welcome to the desert of the real.

Did I just make Morrowind sound really negative? That depends. None of what I pointed out is inherently bad. It’s a conscious design decision to encourage the player to explore the immense game world. The non-regenerative health system means that you have to plan for fights, at least initially before your character is über geared. You feel the rush of adrenalin in fights, or the panic as you look at your lowly health and dwindling potions count. The enchanting and spell creation system is also a lot more comprehensive that in Oblivion or Skyrim (where there’s no spell creation at all). The UI is done right. You get a grid for inventory, instead of a list, as it should always should have been. Buffs are shown on screen, identifiable by their icons as in traditional RPGs and modern MMOs, instead of a list within another list.

If I caught your excitement, but you’re still hesitant about playing a game that might resemble a giant pixel monster by today’s standard (it really isn’t), you’re just in luck. 2.0 of the Morrowind overhaul project was just released today, and it makes the game look a lot better. However, if you have it in you, I highly encourage you to play vanilla Morrowind to get a true experience of the game as it was originally designed.

Trialing a dragon for war crimes

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Calreth

Despite digesting a hearty amount of Skyrim news daily, I’ve still somehow managed to not know all the spoilers, and this particular discovery surprised me.

Paarthurnax is a war criminal.

Paarthurnax was apparently Alduin right hand man during Alduin’s last hunger episode where he ate up a whole bunch of Nords.

I did know beforehand that I’d eventually have to kill Paarthurnax, but I wasn’t aware of the circumstances that revolved around it. I had supposed there’d be some complexity involved, but its revelation felt sudden and rushed. The scenario almost seemed too casual and a little comical.

Me: I need help in luring a dragon and trapping it.


Esbern: Okay, let me check our archives. Ah! Here's the shout you need.
Me: Thanks, I'll catch you later.
Esbern: No problem, don't forget to close the door on your way out. Oh! And by the way, your buddy, the one you've spent lots of time with lately, the one who is trying to help you save the world, Paarthurnax was his name yeah? He has not been too honest with you. He really is a big bad guy that used to do lots of bad things. Don't mind killing him, yeah? Cheers!

Me: Uhm...

Okay, I’ll admit I paraphrased a little there, but that’s about the essence of what happened. The information is just handed over in one conversation axiomatically, and that’s it. It’s not very good storytelling.

That’s not all there is to take away from the event though. There’s still something else, a question that some of us think little about because there’s no easy answer to it.

What is statute of limitation on war crimes?

While I don’t know precisely when Alduin’s previous coming was, it can safe to assume from conversations with Paarthurnax that at least a couple of hundreds of years has passed since. Furthermore, since dragons have not been sighted since Alduin’s disappearance, Paarthurnax was not involved in acts of terrorism during that period. Simply, what Paarthurnax did, it happened a long time ago, and judging from the player’s encounters with him, he’s probably reformed.

How far back do we look when judging a person? Do people change, or are they permanently banded criminals? To this day, ex-prison guards who were unfortunate enough to serve under the Nazi regime 60 years ago are still being hunted down for their actions in the past. Are they the same person as they were 60 years ago? Or have they changed since?

I don’t have answers for these questions, but it’s certainly something to think about.

Gear woes in RPGs: You need everything

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Calreth

Carry all the things

As you gravitate towards end game, the amount of essential items to carry increases astronomically. I’m not talking about the bazallion unstackable vendor trash from every mob. I’m talking about gear you need to bring along to ensure an optimal experience for a dungeon run or raid.

Any semi-experienced player will tell you that having the right gear for right encounter will make the fight easier, or at least more manageable. Fire breathing dragon? You better have a resist set for that. Sith lord that casts lightning bolts? Better have another set of shock resist gear. Ice elementals? Frost resist or GTFO. Magikarp? Water resist gear on now! A troll with high melee resists? Time to switch to mage gear and blast away, or alternatively, add it to my ignore list.

Do you see the problem now?

This problem is less exacerbated in an MMO such as Rift in comparison to an open world single player RPG like Skyrim. In MMOs, I usually have a set goal, or at least a vague idea of what I want to set about accomplishing in the next hour. I know I’ll need death and water resist gear if I’m going to raid Hammerknell for the night. I know the mechanics and what to expect and prepare accordingly. This is less true in Skyrim. I wander around aimlessly. I stumble into dungeons with cultist mage groups and dragons swoop down on me. The result? I carry an entire wardrobe with me.

Many rings (and necklaces) to rule them all!

I find myself doing the gear shuffle between or even during fights and it feels rather silly. Surely, there must be a better way to go about this?

To Whiterun

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Calreth

I arrived in Whiterun, exhausted and penniless. The suit of armor, if you can call it that, given to me by the blacksmith in Riverwood for my travels barely held together. The result of a ferocious attack by a pack of wolves.

Passing by the marketplace, I overheard something about ‘Companions’ and ‘gold for able bodied fighters’. I needed the money, I needed a place rest. This is no time to be picky. I asked a nearby grocer for directions, and soon found myself at the doors of Jorrvaskr.

The recruiter, a brawny looking Nord, sneered at my meek body, weak from days of travel. Well, mostly running from wolves, but there’s no need to volunteer that information. He doesn’t think I’m capable. I disagreed. We decided to take it outside.

At this point, I was full with hunger and invigorate with tiredness. I was fueled by my own desperation. He seemed taken a back and staggered as I slammed the hilt of my sword against his shield over and over. He conceded.

We went back indoors and I was led downstairs into a large communal hall where members of the Companion could lodge in-between jobs.I slept.

Break From Reality

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Calreth

Now, don't tell me that didn't hurt

I ran. It as now or never. The basilisk like wings swooped low, knocking the guard down. Screams lit up around me. Knees close to my chest, I sprinted across the gravel road. My back and cheek burned as I ran. It was only when I stopped to catch my breathe that the reality of the situation dawned on me.

I had escape the executioner’s axe, only to be almost incinerated by the fiery heat that is a dragon’s breathe.

The people present seem to be split into two groups. Guards were trying to round up scared families. A few whom I recognized being on the caravan seemed to have form a group of their own.

I could choose to either follow the Imperial or the group of prisoners. Looking at the sorry state of their gear though, I felt my chance with the Imperial was better. Besides, as I lifted a sword up from the charred remains of a body, I could always slit his throat if he wasn’t to my liking.

Now that the exams are over for me, Skyrim is on full swing. I’ve decided to start all over again with a fresh new character so that I can experience the game in long play sessions, rather than an hour here and there. I find long sessions more immersive and I tend to not remember much after a short session. Also, now that I’ve a better knowledge of game mechanics, I can distribute my skill points more effectively. Meet Calreth reborned.

The new and improved Calreth

/unequip Study Hat
/equip Gaming Hat

Rift PVP gear changes: should I cry or be happy?

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Calreth

Just over a day of being elated after spending an extended weekend grinding to r8, it seems that all the effort is going to be for naught. According to this dev post published today, the usefulness of PvP gear in PvE is going to be effectively cut by half in the next hot fix.

While I think this is the right move, and that in a game where you have separate PvP and PvE servers, those who choose to play on the PvE servers should never be forced to PvP for gear or other reasons, I’m pissed that they choose to announce the changes after I spend the effort getting gear which would be pointless to have after the patch. If I knew this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have spent all those hours in warfronts.

But what can I say or do about it? For those of us who have been playing MMOs for a long period of time, we know the cycle of nerfs and boosts is a part of the life. Classes could be FoTM one patch, and then broken so badly the next that anyone would be foolish to play it. Gear gets re-itemized and essentially “reset” whenever a major patch brings out new content. I’ve played long enough to be apathetic to these changes.

So what am I going to do? I could hit the forums with a couple of angry posts demanding that Trion not push this changes to the live servers and threaten to cut my subscription if they do, but to be realistic, that’s not going to change anything. Instead, I’m going to allow myself a long sigh, sober up and embrace the grind, one again.

Perpetually Bored

The incessant rants of an anhedonic cynic

Category Archives: Gaming