Game of Thrones

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I’ve read the first two books (of 5) and have yet to watch the TV series.

Similar to Rowling, Martin is a good writer but a bad author.  You can easily visualize the setting and the people, there is some character growth (though stereotypical) and there are no loose ends.  The downside is that he will spend 2-10 chapters explaining a given situation, hyping up an event and then providing a Deux Ex Machina to completely bypass it.

There are times where it’s warranted, where an author has simply painted themselves into a corner and needs to close a loophole.  Martin uses it religiously, dozens of times in both books though the second is the most evident.  Quite honestly, there is ZERO character progress in the second book.  You could completely ignore it and realize the story and characters haven’t moved an inch.  Each time he alludes to something major happening, some miracle happens to avoid it.  Even a major character death (which happens “off-screen”, all too often in the books too), he successfully brings them back from the dead by hiding in the basement.  While the building burns and crumbles on top of them.  And they leave without a scratch and completely unaware until they leave. Just…wow.

So, I’m done with those books.  On to something new or maybe even old.

Edit: I forgot to add, that this writing method is used in the first chapter of the 3rd book, essentially making it worthless.

WoW Finally Caves to RMT

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Blizzard has, for a while now, offered vanity pets on their website that can be used in game.  10-20$ per item and the catch was that once purchased, it only worked on the characters linked to your account.  That’s changed.

Blizz is introducing a pet that can be traded.

Why the change of heart?  To quote:

Since the introduction of the Pet Store, many players have been asking for ways to get the companions we offer there without having to spend real-world cash. By making the Guardian Cub tradable (much like the BoE mounts from the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game), players interested in the new pet will have fun, alternative in-game ways to get one. In addition to trading the pet, players can give the Guardian Cub as a gift to another character for a special occasion; guild leaders can use them to reward members for a job well done; and so on. We also hope this change will help reduce the number of incidents of scamming via trading for invalid pet codes.

Basically, they want people to have the change to legitimately buy in-game gold with real world cash.  Of course, the actual value of gold in-game will vary depending on what people are willing to spend and it is guaranteed to be a much worse deal than buying from a farmer.  The difference is that Blizzard takes your money.

I have reservations about a sub+item shop game.  I pay X amount of dollars for all content, why should I be paying more?  In most cases, the items are not game related, in that they don’t give you some sort of edge or benefit.  WoW is similar in this regard while games like Star Trek Online (going F2P in few weeks) is the opposite.  Diablo 3 however is a pure item shop game, but it’s not planned to be a competitive game, so the impact should be negligible.  Then again, Blizz is making money on trades.

It really is an interesting market we see nowdays.  Blizzard is moving more and more towards the casual, time-restricted crowd that has disposable income to bypass the grind that people with more free time are willing to blow through.  Sadly, they are also trying to keep raiders around and that honestly died a year ago.

 

 

 

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Harry Potter

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So I saw the final HP film this weekend. I had already read all the books in the winter. Took a week. I had conflicting issues with the books and the films – well – they didn’t help much.

To say that HK Rowling is a good writer is up for debate.  Her writing skills (the words) are adequate and the structure is relatively sound.  She doesn’t overexpose or use stupid allegories (hello Dan Brown!) and there’s a given logic to her stories.  Her messages are simple and I think that’s what people resonate with.

To say that she is a good author is a different matter.  The first two books are relatively simple in scope, with few large surprises.  Sure, you get the idea that the kids are just plain lucky at times but they are kids scrapping by and they don’t want the credit.  By the third book though, Harry is seen as some wizarding master yet in reality, he is bullshitting his way through every book, all the way to the end.  Think about it, does Harry change at all in personality from book 1 to 7 – after he finds out he’s a wizard?  Do any of the characters?  They are identical throughout and nothing changes but the setting.  The characters are bland and have zero self-discovery.

The last point I want to make, and it’s an important one, is that when you work in fantasy and specifically magic, you need to either make the items completely outside of reality OR an augmented reality.  Flying broomsticks?  Cool, it becomes the defacto method of transport in all the books – next to that portal thing they do.  Invisibility cloak?  Not cool.  You can use it to sneak EVERYWHERE and solve 90% of the problems found in the books – especially that only 2 people in the entire world can detect it.

The absolute worst culprit is the time turner, a device that lets you go back in time.  See, the thing about time travel is that it has no bearing on today.  If I want to go back and kill Hitler, I can do it today, tomorrow, 5 years from now, it makes no difference.  Why in the world is that device even in the books?  Oh, Diggory died in the graveyard at 8pm and at 7:55 the world’s baddest bad guy was reborn?  Let’s port back to 7:54 and stop it.  Pick a magical item in the HP world and you will find insane plot holes and luck.

So after reading the books I was mad as hell that HK is praised as some messiah for literature.  It’s a rip-off from dozens of stories already told (she’s been successfully sued for it too), written with the skill of a high school student and the technical prowess of a Cracker Jack box.  At least the films don’t take themselves seriously and avoid a lot of the absolutely retarded plot points from the books.

Oh, and Voldermort dying at the end of it all?  If you follow the plot points, he killed himself.  Just saying.

Fun or Not?

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I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to play games for over 20 years.  I’ve seen the good (Zelda, Diablo, UO), the bad (half the n64 library) and the ugly (Contra’s difficulty, FF’s downward spiral).  Through it all, the only binding factor is fun.

When I’m playing I don’t think “Am I having fun?”, since I wouldn’t be playing if I didn’t.  Sure, there are games that take a while to get going (Kingdom Hearts 2 I’m looking at you) and some games that go through bad patches (Deus Ex:HR) but are in their essence, great games.  Rarely do I find a game so bad that I just drop it completely.  I guess that’s why I buy so few games, I only play the ones I know I will want to play.

Certainly back in the day there were more crappy games.  They cost next to nothing to produce, there were no aggregate review scores and the internet didn’t let people play the game before release.  We have better quality today but in the same token we have more games to chose from.  To set themselves apart, the games focus on niche areas – harvesting, Smurfs, combat, FPS and so on.  It’s easier to find a game that provides your type of fun but at the same time, there are dozens more games that you simply will not touch because they have no appeal.  I think I played 75% of the SNES library and I have a grand total of 6 PS3 games.

It’s interesting to see a game that aims for the most sales and the most diversity while also appealing to their base crowd.  MMOs fit that rather well since they require thousands of players together in order to succeed.  It’s also interesting to hear the people complain about the game going one way instead of another, while still playing it.  How MMOs will work in the future is another post entirely but it surely seems that the persistent online game world (Farmville counts) is the way to ensure maximum fun (since everyone wants some social aspect) while piecemealing in the niche products.  Kinda like Jello with fruit inside.

The Problem With Jedi

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This supposes that you have seen all 6 films and have not read much more into the fan fiction (there are hundreds of books, especially the new jedi order ones).  Maybe you played some Star Wars battlefront or maybe Dark Forces – hell maybe even Force Unleashed.  All in all, you know that Jedi suck.

In the first two films, you had a whinny wimp of a jedi but still pretty cool in what could be done.  In the third you had him against a Sith Lord and Empreror who shoot lightning out of their hands and can’t be beaten (except by each other).  Sith are awesome but they have power issues.  The 3 prequels showed you how stupid the jedi order is and why it essentially deserved to be wiped out.  Not a single person who watched those movies found an ounce of guilt to watch them all die (well maybe the kiddie jedis).  Other than Anakin, Obi-Wan and Yoda, you had dozens and dozens of jedi who just sat down for 3 movies while the Sith is jumping from planet to planet, throwing stuff, beating people up – basically doing what they want to do.  Oh, and more lightning.  When Anakin dies in the final prequel, he’s still a jedi and boy are we happy to see him die.

The games are interesting in themselves. Dark Forces you were a jedi of sorts but not any jedi I’ve ever seen in a movie.  You blew crap up all the time and had great powers.  Knights of the Old Republic let you play good or evil and I’ll be damned if anyone went full healing rather than full lightning.  Force Unleashed is you as a bad guy, plain and simple.  If at the end of the first one they said “now you’re good, gimme your lightning” I would have thrown up.

The Star Wars franchise was built around the samurai code of honor – mortals versus demons.  Then George humanized these demons and took away all the honor from the mortals.

So here we look at The Old Republic and class choice.  There are 4 in the Jedi order and 4 in the Sith Empire but they pretty much are mirrors of each other.  So if you have a choice between playing a goody two-shoes jedi who runs around healing and throwing rocks at people and a sith who shoots lightning and burns people, where you going to go?  The same place over 75% of the player population is going to go.

I Told You So

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In the category of painfully obvious, DCUO is going free to play.  I guess they wanted to milk as much of it as possible before the swap but the game is designed for F2P, from start to finish.  I bought it when 2 weeks after it launched, leveled 3 characters to max level in 2 weeks and then the game died.  There was nothing to do but hunt other costumes.  Raids/dungeons/groups were horribly broken.  At the 30 day mark from game launch, the servers emptied completely.  I could be on at 8pm and never meet another soul.

During the summer, they merged all the servers into one big one.  Well, 1 per continent, per device (PS3 and PC) for a total of 4.  That from an initial total of like 60.  Heck, we’re barely 7 months away from launch, so this might be a record for time to swap.

Is it worth giving a shot as F2P?  Hell yes.  The core game is solid and leveling to 30 is a LOT of fun.  It lasts about what you’d expect from a console game, maybe 8-10 hours.  It’s at that point that the F2P will get interesting.  Either they add interesting content so people pay or the game truly dies.  My vote is the latter.

Poor Design

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Here’s an interesting tidbit from WoW and patch 4.3

Melee classes will be getting a buff that is only active in the new raid to help them compete with ranged classes.

What does this mean exactly?  It means that melee classes (the up close and personal ones) are finally being acknowledged as being inferior.  This includes all variants of rogues, DPS warriors, DPS DKs, cat druids and enhance shamans.  Last expansion (Lich King) focuses on bringing the player and not the class, so that for the most part, every character brought something useful to a fight.  This expansion, there are quite a few classes that simply are useless in high level content.  Rogues are gone, maybe 5% of the entire player population, enhance shammys are dead, DKs and Warriors are only good for tanking and druids are going caster or tank.  There’s so much twitch, AE, move-or-die elements in fights that anyone standing close to a boss is near guaranteed to die.

Rift has this issue a bit as well with some warrior builds, though everyone can play at range if they want.  Solid decision since you can swap to a melee build when it works.  SWTOR has 4 (out of 16) builds that work only in melee and 2 more than are melee tanks, a HUGE disadvantage when you look at the ranged variants.

This type of buff in WoW is akin to using duct tape to fix a cracked window.  You’ll need to keep patching the window until you decide to replace it.  Games have reached a level of complexity where situational awareness is the primary key for survival and being in melee range is simply a guaranteed way to die.  You want a better fix that’s just as stupid?  Increase melee DPS range to that of other ranged attackers.  Make tanking skills require the minimum that currently exists.  Done.

Diablo, Blizzard and Bioware

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I think Diablo was the first computer game where I actively played with other people. Well I’m sure there were BBS games along the way but this was the first where I knew who I was playing with.  Lots of polish, fun combat and just a well thought out game. Diablo 2 was a vast improvement, Warcraft 2&3, Starcraft –  all games I played the crap out of.  World of Warcraft was like that too, just addicting in the polish and content.

Bioware (or previously Black Isle) is in a similar boat but for single player games.  They were amazing stories with solid systems to back them up.  No one doubts that Mass Effect 2’s story was epic but the systems supporting it were iffy at times.

Today I can look up the mobile phone app store and find games for 5$ that are innovative and can keep me busy for 10-30 hours.  There are free MMOs to compete with, games with epic stories, systems and content.  If you’ve played Plants vs Zombies at all, then you can see what a smaller company can do when they have vision.

Blizzard and Bioware are losing their vision and becoming corporate in their activities.  When at first you could see the passion ooze from their games, now you can clearly see that’s it’s just automation and basically a cash draw.  Cataclysm brought nothing new or fun to the game, just more time sinks.  Dragon Age 2’s zones were limited to a city and the choices were boiled down to half of it’s predecessor.

After having watched some Diablo 3 videos (the NDA is lifted, so check you tube) you can see that the game is near identical to Diablo 2.  I have trouble seeing why it would run ahead of the pack if not for the name of the company rather than the quality of the game (which I hear is ho-hum). Compared to other dungeon runners (hello Torchlight!), there just isn’t anything here that says play me.

I have an Xbox360 and a PS3.  I haven’t played an Xbox game since Batman 2 years ago and my PS3 has a collection of 4 games total.  Why would I pay 60$ for trash when I can pay 5$ for something fun, exciting and time consuming?

I am losing faith in the industry day after day in that the spirit of the game is gone and the spirit of the almighty dollar is taking its place.