Pumping Irony

Warning: High Likelihood of Spoilers!

As always, due to my job I am nowhere near finished with Mass Effect 2 yet. I’m possibly not even halfway finished, not really sure since I’ve been avoiding storyline spoilers, etc. for the most part, though I’ve heard rumors it’s a shorter game. I have recruited the first batch of NPC squad-mates — Archangel aka Garrus from Mass Effect 1, “Jack” the biotic psychotic convict, Professor Mordin, Grunt the Krogan super-soldier prototype, and the DLC mercenary Zaeed  — and have completed the first mission for the Illusive Man where Shepard fights some Collectors — the new galactic enemy for Mass Effect 2 which look like a cross between Turians and the aliens Will Smith fought in Independence Day (I’m secretly hoping Shepard spazzes out shouting “Who’s the man? Huh? Who’s the man? Wait til I get another ship and I’ma line your friends up beside you! *whap!* Welcome to the Citadel!”) — then has a brief reunion with Ashley Williams, who gives him an earful for, in her eyes, betraying the Alliance (and her?) and working for Cerberus. The two Cerberus personnel Shepard begins the game with, Jacob and Miranda, have given Shepard their personal stories leading to their Loyalty quests but I’ve not yet deviated the Normandy off-course to begin either of them.

For this first Mass Effect 2 article, I will give my impressions of the game so far as well as seeing how I fared on my Mass Effect 2 Wishlist a few weeks ago.

I imported my Mass Effect character, a male Soldier Paragon who I completed one playthrough of Mass Effect with. I still intend on doing a second playthrough to get him to level cap and complete a few extra achievements, as well as playing a biotic class to re-play as a Renegade someday. But for now I was most comfortable with the Soldier class in Mass Effect as well as being comfortable with the Shepard I’d already played, so I wanted to continue his story in Mass Effect 2 rather than starting a fresh character.

Let’s start with my Wishlist items:

1) Make it fun from the start.

I’ve had a real problem with Western RPG’s in that, while they may be stylistically more appealing to me than JRPG’s, they have been intrinsically boring as well. I’m still nowhere near finishing Fallout 3, and haven’t even played in months. Oblivion? I did the initial quest to escape the castle and get into the world and haven’t played since. Checking the timestamps on my Mass Effect achievements, I completed Eden Prime in July, 2008 then didn’t play again until November, where the game finally picked up pace and retained my interest and I completed the first playthrough at the end of January, 2009. (Who says achievements are useless?)

Compare that to Dragon Age: Origins which was immediately fun and intriguing and for the most part kept up the pace the entire game. The only break I took from playing Dragon Age was due to the deluge of heavy-hitting AAA titles that released back-to-back from September through December, and even then I’d still stop in DAO to run a quest or few in between the new shiny games.

Mass Effect 2 has done a great job so far of being cool, fun and interesting the whole time I’m playing and I actually look forward to my next session whereas the other RPG’s I mentioned, obviously that has not been the case. The opening CGI cinematic with the Normandy crew frantically ejecting before it was destroyed while Shepard staying behind to fight through the floating wreckage to save Joker as the Normandy is in her final, fiery death throes, then ultimately giving his life as he ejects Joker’s escape pod while the enemy ship fires its final blast (hey, I did warn about spoilers!) was very gripping and I think I even made a few “oooooh’s” out loud. Even though BioWare made no secrets about the whole “death of Shepard” thing, I never knew how true that was or how and when it would happen, so starting the game that way had me reeling in shock and kept me riveted to the screen.

2) Improved dialogue animations.

Oh, my! I stated in the Wishlist how the characters were mostly stiff mannequins during dialogue scenes with only a few animation frames. Mass Effect 2 dramatically improves that with character shifting between idle stances, pacing back and forth, NPC’s looking at whomever is speaking, NPC’s continuing their activities in the background and so forth. All the character textures and animations have been improved and are utilized well during dialogue scenes. However… Occasionally there are times during dialogue scenes when the new higher-polygon-count and more complex character models appear a little strange during their close-up scenes, especially when the facial animations for emotional portrayal are used. One recent close-up of Shepard had him open his eyes wide, probably to appear amazed or shocked, but they opened so wide with his bright white round eyeball models hanging in the sockets that he looked more like a Halloween mask. Jacob is even more noticeable because his facial expressions get a bit wonky fairly often. Sometimes he’s Jacob, former Alliance grunt turned Cerberus soldier. But other times he answers that age-old question “What would Marty Feldman look like if his corpse was put through the Universal Soldier program?” What, no one else ever wondered that? No one? Anyone? Hmph!

3) Improved usage of Unreal Engine 3.

Mass Effect was, I believe, BioWare’s first time using UE3. It showed. UE3 is well-known for texture loading and pop-in issues, and those reared their head in Mass Effect more than any other UE3 title I can think of. In addition, there were a lot of performance issues where the framerate would suddenly start chugging along, sometimes making it difficult to control for brief periods. Auto-saves would freeze the game. Memory usage was inefficient with frequent load spots that would freeze the game momentarily. During dialogues, characters would randomly jump from position to position rather than smooth animation cycles. All in all, Mass Effect was one of the worst offenders I have personally played when it comes to the laundry list of UE3 technical issues.

I am pleased to say that BioWare has certainly taken the past couple of years to adequately familiarize themselves with the engine. Every single UE3 issue present in the first Mass Effect has been addressed in the sequel. I’ve yet to have even a single noticeable framerate drop, even in busy locations. I loaded up Mass Effect for comparison and just jogging through the Citadel the engine was having difficulty and sprinting nearly made it a slideshow a few times, the framerate dropped so badly. Mass Effect 2 handles its asynchronous streaming fantastically. Manually save your game and you’re right back to controlling Shepard while the “save” icon does its thing. If it weren’t for that “saving” icon you’d never even know you’d reached an auto-save point, and even in the largest areas I’ve seen so far the game never stops to load new parts of the same map. All this is with even better graphics, more detailed environments and the full arsenal of lighting and particle effects that are UE3’s specialty. Kudos to the BioWare team!

Even more amazing, I think Mass Effect 2 is the first and only UE3 game I’ve seen where the initial texture loading isn’t plainly obvious. Epic’s own Gears of War 2 does it. Borderlands does it, and it’s only a few months old. I have no proof of this, but I suspect BioWare uses the pre-mission character loadout screen as a buffer of sorts, or perhaps as a distraction, while the textures load in the background so that when the screen shifts to the game, everything is already loaded and ready to go. If I was a betting man, I’d say BioWare got some assistance and consultation from Epic this time, as they are known for providing those services for their engine, but regardless the results seen in Mass Effect 2 are damn impressive.

4) No elevators, please.

To a small degree, I am actually torn on this. In Mass Effect those torturously lengthy elevator rides were an opportunity to pan the camera around and check out the gear of Shepard and his team without them moving around. Some of the elevator conversations were humorous, sort of a pre-cursor to the conversations heard in Dragon Age: Origins, as was some of the news announcements over the radio. On the other hand, the elevators were torturously lengthy and I don’t miss that at all. To be fair, the elevators were a roleplay-ish compromise to the technical issue of having UE3 live-stream the new level. Mass Effect 2 does technically have a few elevators, but entering an elevator simply presents a level selection screen, then a loading screen while the new level is loaded. The loading is pretty fast, and the loading screens themselves are animated so it’s not that bad, really. On the Normandy it’s nice because the loading screen is a sort of 3D wire-mesh of the ship showing the elevator progress to the selected level.

5) Moral ambiguity.

Ok, I struck out on this one, though it was more of a hope based on other RPG’s such as Dragon Age: Origins which had shades of grey and I actually had to read the responses to see which was appropriate to the character I was playing. Mass Effect was pretty simple in it’s Good (Paragon) or Bad (Renegade) and you always know that the top choice is Paragon, the middle is neutral and the bottom is Renegade. It’s the same in Mass Effect 2 and honestly, while there was a ton of changes streamlining to the actual gameplay and mechanics in Mass Effect 2, the dialogue circle is a big part of the Mass Effect “feel” and it’s probably for the best that it was kept intact to avoid breaking too far from feeling like a Mass Effect game.

So, 4 out of 5 on my wishlist, number 5 being a bit on the bogus side to begin with, so not bad! Now for some general impressions of the game so far.

The first Mass Effect was a bit of genre-blending on BioWare’s part as a relatively full-blown RPG disguised as a third-person shooter. On the downside, that disguise was rather flimsy since if you so much as fired a shot in the general vicinity of an enemy it was considered a hit and the RPG die rolls took over to determine the actual result. This was even more obvious in the Mako which would only hit within a specific range, regardless where the targeting reticule was capable of aiming. BioWare said that among the many improvements for the sequel that they wanted to step up their game on the shooting aspect. They’ve done just that. If there is any RPG die roll combat resolution occuring, it’s very well hidden. Weapons don’t have stats, and armor only has a mild bonus to a single aspect of combat. If I may be so bold, I will compare Mass Effect 2 to Borderlands. Gearbox may have pioneered the acronym “RPS” for Role-Playing Shooter and they did an excellent job of providing a solid first-person shooter based solely on player skill with a few (mostly passive) RPG abilities. With Mass Effect 2, BioWare has seemingly reversed the roles of the first game, delivering a solid third-person shooter with some RPG features; BioWare’s own take on an “RPS.”

On that note, I mentioned above that I suspected BioWare got some assistance from Epic on the Unreal Engine 3. I also suspect the BioWare guys have been playing a lot of Epic’s Gears of War games, because an awful lot of the new controls and abilities in Mass Effect 2 are derivative of the Gears of War series. In Mass Effect 1 holding the A button put Shepard into a mild sprint. In Mass Effect 2 the camera actually bumps along like a sort of “follow cam” you’d see in chase scenes in a movie. Exactly like Gears of War, which also uses the A button. The Gears of War series is a cover-based shooter where pressing the A button near a wall or short barrier would put Fenix into cover then pop his head out to aim a shot then safely fall back under cover. Mass Effect 2 has the exact same controls. In Mass Effect 1, either the LT or RT would draw weapons and the B button would stow them. Now, in Mass Effect 2 pressing the Back button stows weapons while the B button is now a melee attack. Exactly like Gears of War. In fact, the only perceivable difference control-wise between the two is that Gears of War uses the X button to interact with objects while Mass Effect 2 uses the A button. Otherwise, it’s not too far a stretch to say that Mass Effect 2 is essentially BioWare’s version of Gears of War with a strong story (they’re all about that Fourth Pillar, remember?) and RPG character progression.

This shift has rubbed some people the wrong way, but I approve. For the most part. Mass Effect 2 has been highly streamlined from the first game. Skills, for example, is one obvious area that this shows. Mass Effect had a whole screen of skills for each character to assign points. Mass Effect 2 has a much smaller choice of skills per character, and only 4 “levels” per skill but achieving that 4th level will “evolve” that skill into another selectable higher skill. For example, as I said earlier, I imported my Mass Effect character who was a Soldier class. In Mass Effect 2 one of the Soldier class skills is Combat Mastery. Achieving level 4 in combat mastery will evolve the Soldier class into either a Commando or Shock Trooper class, which has a few different abilities and bonuses, especially bonuses to Paragon/Renegade points. Also each individual point I assign to any skill is immediately noticeable whereas the effect was much more subtle in the first game, if it was even noticeable at all.

Some aspects have gone far beyond mere streamlining, though. The unholy mess that was the inventory system has been completely removed, for example, and replaced with weapon loadout lockers. One is located in the Normandy’s armory and most locations where missions or combat can occur will have one. Those are the only points you can choose which specific weapon within each weapon category that Shepard and his team will carry with them.

There is very little in the way of acquiring better gear either, though personally I don’t see that as a downside for the type of RPG that the Mass Effect series is. In an MMO or RPG-ish games like Diablo clones (including Borderlands) enemies are little more than loot piñatas and the constant urge to acquire better gear is what keeps players coming back for more. Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins are the only two BioWare RPG’s I’ve ever played (and completed) and in both of those the characters themselves and the storyline is what kept me playing, not gear. While gear dropped constantly in DA:O I very rarely found anything that was actually worthy of using and all my characters kept their gear they acquired mid-game throughout the rest of the game and its conclusion. Same with Mass Effect, I had tons of “stuff” in my inventory but most of it was vendor trash and there was very rarely any reason to upgrade. If I found any armor for my NPC team, I’d usually equip it based on looks because they almost always had equivalent stats. While having few actual sets of armor, Mass Effect 2 actually has more customization available, but only for Shepard. Your NPC companions get one “upgrade” upon completion of their respective Loyalty quest but from what I’ve heard it’s nothing more than a color change on the same armor.

Mass Effect 2 did add some cool MMO-ish features like casual appearance. Think of LOTRO’s (and EQ2) “appearance tab” and you’ve got the gist of it. In Shepard’s quarters on the Normandy you can choose which set of armor he wears while out and about and choose from a few choices of non-combat appearances while aboard the Normandy. You can also choose background music that plays while in your room, and buy fish for the aquarium, though you have to stop by to feed them rather frequently or they die.

Planetary exploration is another feature that so far seems to have been put on the chopping block. The first game had the Mako rover, which was cool in concept but between the horrible controls and gawd-awful physics, just didn’t work at all. The planets’ landscapes in Mass Effect were uninspired at best, and downright atrocious at worst. Rather than fixing things up for the sequel, BioWare outright removed them, giving us planetary scanning instead. Now, at first I was excited about this because someone in the beta tweeted how fun scanning was, and I thought there would also be some planetary exploration. I was looking forward to having a Lt. Data moment proudly exclaiming “I’d be happy to, sir! I just love scanning for life forms!” then singing “Life forms! You tiny little life forms! My precious little life forms! Where are you?” But alas, that is not to be. Rather than something that actually makes, you know, sense and simply having EDI (the onboard Cerberus AI) automatically scan the planet and display the locations of resources, etc. we have to manually scan a small circle of the planet’s surface waiting for a spike on the meter then launch a probe to gather the resources. This involves holding the LT to actually run the scanner, which moves rather slowly during scanning. I’ve taken to simply rapid-firing the LT while moving the scanner reticule up and down the planetary grid, only slowing when I feel a spike (which displays graphically but also uses the gamepad’s rumblers) then launching a probe. Needless to say, scanning is nothing more than a boring time-sink, but one that is required because the various resources are currencies spent on researching upgrades.

Speaking of pointless time-sinks, let’s talk about hacking. In Mass Effect 1 hacking was a simplified quick-time-event (QTE) version of the old Simon game only rather than repeating the sequence by memory, you had to quickly press the appropriate button when it illuminated on the Simon screen. In Mass Effect 2, bypassing and hacking each have their own mini-games. Bypassing (usually used to open a door) is accomplished on a circuitboard screen. Several nodes are shown, each with its own icon that displays upon mouseover. Find an icon then mouseover the other nodes until you find the matching node to close the circuit. Simple enough, and fairly quick. Hacking, on the other hand, shows a scrolling grid of segments of “code” and a target segment. You simply sit back and watch the grid scroll along until hopefully the target segment appears before the timer runs out and you click it. Three or four segments in total. Both bypassing and hacking feel very unfinished, tacked on, and obviously a shallow time-sink to expand the total playtime by a few minutes at a time. They’re both quite boring as well, though if I had to choose one, I’d much prefer the bypassing mini-game. I think I prefer scanning planets over hacking, and believe me when I say that I am not enjoying scanning planets. At all.

I’ve mentioned how the graphics have improved, performance improved, and all the UE3 eye candy is out in full force already. My initial impression is that the actual maps themselves are smaller than in Mass Effect 1 but so far they are more immersive. There’s usually more actually going on than before. Sure, in the first game the Citadel was a huge area, but considering it was supposed to be this huge multicultural melting pot, it was mostly empty. The parts of the Citadel I’ve seen so far in Mass Effect 2 seemed smaller in comparison but much more lively and more representative of what the Citadel is supposed to be. Remember the nightclub Chora’s Den in the first game? Now the Citadel has a new club called Flux and there’s an even bigger club called Afterlife on the Omega station that are far more believable even though they don’t offer any more actual interaction than before. BioWare did have some actual exotic dancers come in for motion capture (I’ll bet that was a fun session!) and comparing the animations of the dancers in Chora’s Den to those in Afterlife is practically night and day. The Flux club has a dance floor where patron NPC’s are dancing and there’s an interactive spot for Shepard to show off his oh-so-white-boy moves. In full armor and weapons, mind you. He’s such a bad dancer you just can’t help but laugh.

Finally, I’d like to mention the Mass Effect dialogue system in general. I just finished Dragon Age: Origins last week then immediately started Mass Effect 2 and the difference in systems is shocking. I much prefer the Mass Effect way of doing things. In DA:O the dialogue choices don’t appear until the character speaking finishes what he or she has to say. Then you choose your response, to which there is no voice acting whatsoever for your own character. The Mass Effect system is to present your upcoming dialogue choices well in advance of the NPC completing his statements so you can prepare your choice ahead of time, and choosing quickly enough will allow for a seamless dialogue delivery. Not to mention Shepard is fully voice-acted for both male and female. Sure, DA:O would have required male and female recordings for each playable race but it would have made a huge difference in bringing some on-screen personality to your own character. The dialogue in Mass Effect 2 has increased dramatically over the first title, with over 31,000 lines of written dialogue that if listened to non-stop start to finish would total over 25 hours. While I stated above for #5 on my wishlist that I feel Mass Effect 2 is better off without all the grey areas, etc. I do hope for the Dragon Age sequel BioWare displays the dialogue choices ahead of time like they do in Mass Effect. I also hope Dragon Age sold enough to become an important enough IP for BioWare to warrant the expense of providing voice acting for the player character next time.

 

Tags: Mass Effect 2, Xbox 360

On today’s episode of Kotaku Talk Radio, BioWare developer Greg Zeschuk said that the Mass Effect IP – a planned trilogy – will not end with the release of Mass Effect 3. In other words, BioWare EA plans to milk the franchise for all it’s worth.

“We’re actually going to continue to use it for stuff and we’re going to continue to make games there. Believe me, we have our work cut out for us for the next little while getting Mass Effect 3 done after this. Don’t worry if you love Mass Effect, there will be more Mass Effect in the future.”

Kotaku’s article gave example’s such as the Halo universe spreading to other genre’s like Ensemble’s swan song title Halo Wars. Not sure that I foresee a “Mass Effect Wars” RTS game on the horizon, but stranger things have happened.

What I could certainly foresee (may as well start a rumor while I’m at it!) is a Mass Effect MMORPG. A multi-platform MMORPG, for that matter, though not cross-platform. Mass Effect is a huge name on consoles and it’s shooter-esqe approach is appealing to many console gamers, myself included.

To use the Warcraft analogy that once upon a time was applied to World of Warcraft, it took three Warcraft games until there was enough Warcraft lore, story, etc. to deserve a MMORPG. That is often used as a counter-argument for why people said there would not be a “Worlds of Starcraft” MMORPG because there’s currently only the one game, with the second game in development. (I could see a Starcraft-based MMOG that was a hybrid RPG and shooter (both first- and third-person, switchable) but Blizzard says their new MMOG is also a new IP, so that theory is out the window. Using the “three games first” theory, it could certainly stand to reason that the Mass Effect IP would have enough interest and sales behind it to warrant development of a MMOG in that universe. I would be interested, but only on the condition they use BioWare-developed RPG systems for it, not the anti-social DIKU mechanics.

The other little tidbit in the podcast was that Mass Effect 3 will also use the same “persistent” save game concept that Mass Effect 2 will be using, checking which decisions were made in Mass Effect 1 to affect how your Mass Effect 3 game will play.

The main reason I find this interesting is that it directly implies Mass Effect 3 will be made during the current console generation. The current generation has already been stretched longer than any previous generation, and both Microsoft and Sony have implied, if not outright stated, to not expect the next hardware generation until at least 2012, most likely 2013 or 2014. I’ve read several “MMOG’s on consoles” blog posts recently and they all cited console generation lifespans as a con, but that argument hasn’t applied this time around, and if I shake my Magic 8 Ball, the next generation will be similar. Quote Everquest all you want, and sure it runs on modern multi-CPU PC’s but I’ve tried several games from the single-core days that are newer than Everquest and they don’t work at all on multi-core CPU’s. Between shifts in CPU’s, GPU’s and DirectX versions, PC’s also have “generations” even if they usually strive to maintain backwards-compatibility most of the time.

However, I would not expect a Mass Effect MMOG to appear within the current console generation. There has been too much feet-dragging on the part of Microsoft, Sony, and every development studio that has ever claimed to be “working on” a console MMOG. The only two I actually expect to see the light of day at all within the current generation is DUST 514 and Final Fantasy XIV. The Magic 8 Ball tells me the next generation of consoles will blur the line a little further between console and PC and will have MMOG’s in mind peripheral-wise, and then we’ll really start seeing some serious development – and releases! – in the massively multiplayer realm.

This has been going on for several months and I don’t know what to do at this point. So I’ll ask here and cross my fingers for suggestions.

I get randomly disconnected for no apparent reason. Sometimes I can go hours between disconnects, sometimes only minutes. I never know when it will happen, just that it will. Makes it rather difficult to get any short multiplayer matches going, much less MMORPG’s which take forever to get anything done. Also pretty much kills streaming Netflix or downloading movie rentals from the Zune Marketplace too.

My ISP is Comcast. I’ve called support, I’ve spoken with reps on Twitter and have had two house calls — the last one was in December, I think?

Originally I had an old DOCSIS 1.0 Linksys cable modem and the WRT54G router. In December I thought perhaps they were old and malfunctioning so I bought a new Motorola SB6120 DOCSIS 3.0 modem and a Netgear WNDR3700 802.11-N router. I also signed up for the more expensive speed package from Comcast to accomodate the additional speed that DOCSIS 3.0 affords.

No luck. I’m still being constantly disconnected.

I’ve removed the router from the equation, so it’s not the networking that’s causing it.

The technician who stopped by last month plugged in his little signal box thingie into the cable line and said I have a very strong signal to the modem. He got up into the cable access box near the circuit breakers and removed all cable signal from the guest bedroom, taking me from four rooms with cable to only three, the idea being that removing one room would strengthen the signal to the others. Apparently that isn’t working either.

The last item I had on my end was the actual RG6 cable from the wall to the modem, which was a couple years old so I bought a brand-new one yesterday, allegedly on the higher-end for digital cable. I’m still being disconnected.

At this point, my temper is getting the best of me every time it happens, which is rather frequently recently.

Any suggestions on other things to check or ideas why I’m being disconnected? I’m paying a hefty sum monthly to Comcast for fast internet. And it is fast. For the few minutes it let’s me stay online.

In the time it took me to write these few short paragraphs, I’ve been disconnected 3 times…

 

BioWare has been going crazy saying how much better the shooting part of the game, and how much better animations and cinematics will be. I’ll take them at their word for that.

My personal short wishlist is:

1. Make it fun from the start, don’t make me wait until the latter part of the game before it gets fun and interesting. They pulled it off with Dragon Age: Origins, but no other Western RPG is coming to mind as I write this that grabbed me from the get-go and kept up the pace the whole game.
2. We know there’s more in-game animations and better cinematic cameras, but I hope they also added some facial expressions this time. In the first game, characters were practically mannequins and depended on listening to the voice acting to convey the emotions. For the sequel, show us the emotions on their face and in their voice.
3. Unreal Engine 3 is being used again, so here’s hoping BioWare has a better grip on it this time than they did on the first game, which was pretty damn rough performance-wise. To make a comparison, look at how Gearbox improved from their first UE3 title, Brother’s in Arms: Hell’s Highway to their recent Borderlands.
4. No elevators. Worst case, if we must tolerate elevators again, at least make them equivalent in speed to the turbolifts from Star Trek.
5. Moral ambiguity. The first Mass Effect was right up there with every other RPG with “choices” in the dialogue that were very obvious in the “good; neutral; bad” morality scale. Again, Dragon Age: Origins played with more grey areas, and I hope that also carries over to Mass Effect 2.

I still haven’t gotten the new PC working yet. No idea what’s wrong with it. The motherboard LED is lit, showing it has power, but the thing just won’t turn on. I thought it was a broken PSU but I did what the Corsair tech told me and the PSU is functioning properly. Someone on Twitter — @BlueKae I think? — suggested I reset the motherboard. Other than that,  SmartPC charges $59 for diagnostics and repair.

The thing is, I’m just not motivated to actually fool with the damned thing! Maybe it’s the whole getting older gradually maturing thing, but I’ve really become spoiled by the 360. I never have to worry about new drivers, buggy third-party services that crash the system, virii or malware, etc. I just turn it on and it works, and everyone I game with gets the same performance.

I’ve always built my own PC’s but this time around, I just wasn’t into it. Not that I’d necessarily be into buying a prefab PC with specs I don’t approve of. I just want to turn the thing on and it works. I’ve lost the thrill of constantly tweaking, working for every ounce I could get out of the PC, and generally jumping through hoops. If I wanted to do all that I’d still be using Linux for games.

The other issue in the back of my mind is the RSI I keep harping about. When I was back in LOTRO and Battlefield 2142 for a couple weeks in November before my PC died, I could feel the mouse wrist tingling after only 30 minutes or less. Hell, even while writing this or doing anything at all on the PC if I don’t make a constant effort to keep my mouse wrist elevated off the desk, I start getting those aching tingles pretty quickly.

The main thing about MMOG’s I miss? Chatting. Kin-mates or guild-mates and friends first, general chat second. I’ve never allowed things to get as bad as they were in the height of my WoW addiction where I’d login because “I just had to” but I had absolutely nothing to do so I’d shift into kitty form and auto-run laps around Ironforge while chatting. But still, in most MMO’s I find that I don’t necessarily play the game all the time; there’s a lot of time idling (or just running, and running, and running) while chatting. Sometimes I just read the chat while running. (Note: riding a mount = running in this respect.) Maybe find a pretty view in the landscape, and pan the camera around, while chatting.

It’s nice, but all that chatting — not to mention using the mouse to move or pan the camera — means my wrist is at constant risk of firing up the RSI again. It’s hard to get motivated to get a new PC working when I know I’ll want to login to LOTRO to see the better performance, better graphics, etc. then spend all day and night running, panning and chatting my way to the doctor again…

I really wish someone would get a fun and high-quality MMOG on the 360 already. One that was built for a console from the ground-up, not a PC MMOG trimmed down because that just won’t work. If a console Age of Conan, for example, ditched the RPG hotbar combat and went to a more action-context-based system (think Batman: Arkham Asylum) I’d be all.over.it!

I’ve had an Xbox 360 pretty much since they came out, but have never managed to unlock 100% of the achievements in a single game before. There are myriad reasons; among the top are replaying at the hardest difficulty, something I’m not usually into doing, and games that have multi-player achievements (GRAW2 is still a sore spot with me, buying every single DLC for the co-op stuff then a week later the guys moved to a new shiny game), not to mention my infamously short attention span.

Today, however, I got my first 100%! I thought it would be Borderlands (and I’m darn close there, not counting the additional DLC achievements) but it turned out to be The Saboteur, which I recently wrote about.

From the Stats page, I’m showing 100% Mission Progress and 100% Freeplay Progress with a total game time of 65:04:25!

While I am excited to finally get my first 100% Unlocked status with a game, I am also a bit sad because The Saboteur is truly an enjoyable experience; it’s a shame there’s nothing left to do now. Pandemic’s WWII Nazi-occupied Paris and its surrounding countryside was a fantastic place to adventure and explore. I will miss it.

I’ve wondered recently if an open-world game of that type would be do-able as a multi-player game on consoles. Not massively-multiplayer, mind you. I’m thinking two modes: the first being the standard Listen server mode that could support 4 players, perhaps a few more, then a persistent Dedicated server mode that could support (picking an arbitrary number) up to 64 players. Similar to Neverwinter Nights? The caveats would be the necessity for an even larger game world, and more activities to actually do besides shoot bad guys and blow things up. Maybe a combination of an open-world game with The Sims allowing for some progression without being an RPG?

I’d love to see someone try it anyway…

 

My Year in Gaming

2009 was, to a degree, a rough patch in gaming for me. I started the year off with Mines of Moria then decided I was due for a total MMO break, which lasted four months, where I mostly got some quality Guild Wars action going with the new guild and alliance there, and just some PvMP in LOTRO. A couple months and burnout set in again and I’ve actually been on MMO break the rest of the year other than a few quick stops in LOTRO and a few weeks with Age of Conan before my PC went on the fritz. I actually intended on restarting LOTRO a month or two ago but the whole PC thing put the kibosh on that.

Luckily, my 360 came through and man, oh man was 2009 ever the time for major high-quality console games! Some of my absolute favorites from this year are Batman: Arkham Asylum, Borderlands, Dragon Age: Origins, and The Saboteur but it doesn’t take but a quick check at my Gamertag profile to see the huge list of games that saw a lot of playtime this year. I’m semi-tempted to add Modern Warfare 2 to the list but I’m still undecided on that one. I can at least admit to having some fun with the multiplayer even though I typically can’t take it for more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time.

For next year I actually hope the release cycle slows down. I haven’t been keeping tabs on the games for 2010 at all since I bought so many this year that I haven’t finished yet. All I know is Mass Effect 2 is soon and Bad Company 2 in March. Otherwise I hope to get back into MMO’s this year; primarily LOTRO with some GW and perhaps AoC on the side. I might — might — finally shut the hell up and actually give EVE a brief shot. Undecided though. I’ve seen it being played and it didn’t strike me as anything I’d enjoy actually playing myself. As I write this, I am hard-pressed to think of a single upcoming MMO that I’m looking forward to, however. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t count since that will be a 2011 game. Possibly Black Prophecy, mostly because I have a sinking feeling that Jumpgate Evolution will end up being WoW in Space with circle-jerk combat. Frankly, Black Prophecy might be a circle-jerk game too, I really don’t know enough about it yet but it’s from the guys who made Neocron — a cool, though flawed as hell, first-person cyberpunk MMO — and the little I’ve seen gives it more of a “darker” feel than JGE, which I think I’d enjoy more. Every other MMO that comes to mind is just another Diku-MMO with yet another pretty, fluffy layer add onto all the layers already devised over the past 5+ years to mask the rotten stench of the broken Diku core.

Honestly, at this point being mostly away from MMO’s it’s been very refreshing to be able to just enjoy gaming without being so genre- and platform-elitist. If I’d sequestered myself in my man-cave with the PC limiting myself to MMO’s — which themselves are extremely limited as games just for the sake of having all those players per server — I would have missed out on some wonderful experiences elsewhere. I suspect most of you could give a crap when I blog about non-MMO games but I always hold that little vestige of hope that if you bother to read my posts, you’re a little more open-minded and not so dead-set on MMO-way or the Highway.

The Best of Intentions

We’d planned on my girlfriend coming to my overnight in Newport News for New Year’s Eve. Everything looked good, I had her listed round-trip all the way here and home again. Then today arrives with bad weather along the East Coast and especially in the Northeast. Flights to Newport News and Norfolk were delayed and downsized so that filled everything up and left no room for non-rev standby passengers so she ended up flying back home after several hours trying. She’s never come on any of my trips or even a single overnight during a trip with me, so I was looking forward to seeing her and spending the night with her for a change. Not to mention it’s a holiday and I very rarely manage to get a holiday off or see family or friends. But just that she was willing to fly up to our hub and put up with all the hassles and passengers — though I must say that New Years’ passengers are much nicer than Christmas passengers; those people are downright evil and retarded — just to end up flying right back home, means a lot to me. I arrived shortly before she headed to her flight home so I at least got to see her for a few minutes, which made my day. No, that made my whole trip! December’s schedule has been rough and I’ve been more exhausted, on edge and moody than usual as a result but today after seeing her smile and sneaking a quick kiss wishing her well as I left for my next flight, everything was ok in my little world for awhile. Happy New Year, I love ya babe!

You, Me, and PI.net

First and foremost, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation and gratitude to those of you who still stop by or have kept this blog in your RSS reader despite a very obvious decline in my writing. So many of us get on our ADHD high-horses and delete any blog that doesn’t update every couple days, minimum, so those of you who have kept me in your feed list, just know that holds meaning to me.

Obviously I decided to keep the server running. I was all but decided on shutting it down, even if it were temporary, but I simply didn’t have the time to handle backing up the blog, images, etc. so it was easier to just shell out the $100 than to lose it all like happened with my previous blog. Offhand, I don’t necessarily know that I plan to increase the number of posts per month, but we’ll see what happens. But I do plan on continuing my pattern of console and PC gaming; MMO and “real” video games. So I hope you’re all ok with that!

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful holiday season so far, and that you’re having a great New Year’s Eve tonight. I look forward to beginning not only the new year but the next decade in the 21st century.

Besides, this is the year we finally get to make contact with those Monoliths before they turn Jupiter supernova and tell us to colonize all its moons except Europa, right? Right?

 

I recently finished Pandemic Studios‘ swan song title, The Saboteur and thought I’d write a bit on my experiences. As usual with me, don’t treat this as an official “review.” There are plenty of those out there already; hit up Metacritic. As a disclaimer, any screenshots I include were obtained from the game’s website; I do not have the capability of taking my own screenshots from my Xbox 360.

It’s no secret that Pandemic Studios hasn’t been their usual selves the past few years. Their recent games have been a bit on the sub-par, glitchy, and unpolished side of things, and in the case of The Lord of the Rings: Conquest utter trash. It’s also no secret that all their games with the aforementioned reputation are games released since their acquisition by EA. Coincidence? I’ll leave that for you to decide. The Saboteur does show a lack of polish in certain areas but overall it’s minor and I’d have to guess a good portion of it could have been worked out if EA hadn’t shuttered the studio and forced an early launch.

Before launch I was undecided on the game. I loved the film noir visuals but I was concerned about two issues. First, support. EA announced they were closing Pandemic three weeks prior to launch. I wasn’t sure at the time if there would be any post-launch patches (they call them Title Updates on consoles) or additional DLC. Since then, EA has kept a team of former Pandemic members attached to the project, already working on patches for the PC edition, etc. No idea if the game will see additional content in form of DLC however. Second, I was concerned that an open-world single-player game would not hold my attention. I never finished any of the GTA3 series; I haven’t finished GTA4 yet (I’m on the last mission, which kicks my ass every time); I own GTA4: The Lost and Damned but haven’t even started playing it yet; I find myself getting frustrated (this is putting it nicely) and quitting because I die so often in Red Faction: Guerilla that I don’t know I’ll ever manage to finish it. But take an open-world game like Crackdown, Mercenaries 2, or Saint’s Row 2 that allows co-op and now we’re talking! Aaron and I have done a bit of Crackdown and quite a bit of Mercenaries 2 in co-op and those sessions are enormously fun with crazy moments of mindless, wanton destruction accented by our own pitched laughter. From a difficulty standpoint, I feel RFG could use a co-op mode, though I won’t completely dismiss the notion that maybe I simply suck at the game. Nah, couldn’t be that. But when thinking of The Saboteur, there are two things in gaming that we just never tire of killing: Nazis and Zombies. The Left 4 Dead series and Borderlands‘ first DLC “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” have the co-op zombie killing covered quite well. I was hoping for some co-op Nazi slaying adventures but it’s not happening here — The Saboteur has a story crafted around a specific character, and those types of games only work in single-player. In the end, after reading tweets and forum posts from Pandemic developers who worked on The Saboteur, combined with my fond remembrance of their pre-EA products, I felt I owed it to myself to get the last “real” Pandemic game. Turns out, it’s a great game, so I’m doubly glad that I did!

Read the rest of this entry »

I think I finally “get” Twitter. After continually being accused of “arguing” over Twitter I took a step back and scrolled as far as my history would allow me and what I discovered is that everyone I follow tweets random, opinionless “stuff.” Just little mini-headlines or newsbytes, at best a 140-character equivalent of a “Now Playing” status on a media player or IM client. The only “social” interaction is perhaps asking for brief advice and getting a few replies, or someone making a completely opinionless tweet acknowledging someone else’s completely opinionless tweet. Obviously I had never noticed that before; that type of “interaction” is foreign to me.

After so many years on BBS’ back in the day, then GEnie, then years on IRC having discussions and sharing opinions, now we all have blogs which by their very definition are there for us to write our opinions and for commenters to also share their opinions on what we just wrote our opinion on, I find it tragically sad that apparently Twitter is most assuredly not for having any opinion on. I didn’t get the memo on that, but everyone can rest assured that “get it” now.

From now on, I’ll just let Raptr, GamerDNA or whatever handle the bulk of my tweets since they are all automated by a script and therefore do not have a person with feelings behind them who may be tempted to share his opinion in a, you know, “social” medium. If I dare make a manual tweet, I shall endeavor to remove any trace of emotion or opinion behind it so that it remains “random stuff” and is therefore acceptable to the delicate Twittersphere.

In other news, as we get closer and closer to my deadline for keeping this server up (4 days to decide), behavior like this from the bloggers I respect the most just brings me closer and closer to shutting this whole thing down. This is all supposed to be enjoyable, not something that brings me stress or leaves me with hurt feelings.

 

 

 

I meant to post this earlier but this trip started off a bit wonky and we ended up at bare minimum rest time last night, so here we go!

Thanks to James Egan over at Massively for catching this two-article interview at Edge Online (a site I don’t read which is why I rely on Massively to do it for me) with CCP Shanghai about DUST 514! Great information and I’m really looking forward to the game. Oh, and I’ve discovered that it’s officially DUST 514 (all capitalized like EVE) not Dust 514…

Part One: Core concepts and mechanics behind the game.
Part Two: How EVE and DUST 514 will (hopefully) interact.

I’ll do my usual bullet-point thing of bits I found interesting.

• The map size has been revealed to be 5 square kilometers. That’s roughly 3.1 square miles for us metric-impaired Americans. Anyone who plays shooters with me knows that I love huge maps, as it provides more real estate for the developers to create multiple objectives.
• The Commander will be located in the Mobile Command Center (MCC) which flies above the map, similar to the Titans in Battlefield 2142. The Commander can issue orders to the mercenaries on his team in an RTS-like fashion, again similar to Battlefield 2142. The Commander also has a full 3D voyeur mode to see the action from a closer perspective. Players have to earn the right (presumably from ranking up via XP like in the Battlefield or Call of Duty games) to be Commander, and if no one is eligible an AI Commander will be assigned. I do hope CCP includes a voting system to oust ineffective Commanders, however; no one likes getting stuck with an incompetent leader who earned the spot simply by playing long enough rather than knowing what he’s doing.
• Prior to the match, the Commander chooses his team’s vehicle and installation loadouts, as well as placing preliminary spawn points. There are ten vehicles and fifteen installations in DUST 514 but a Commander can only choose five of each per map. CCP compared it to Magic: the Gathering where you prepare your deck ahead of time, not knowing precisely what your opponent will be bringing to the battle.
• Once the mercenary infantry has brought down the shields of the enemy MCC, the Commander has missiles, etc. to destroy it; another similarity to Battlefield 2142’s Titan mode that DUST 514 looks to improve upon.
• CCP is still fiddling with the number of players per map but Edge says it’s unlikely to go as high as 256, like MAG is doing, because of the “elaborate firepower” available to each team. Regardless, it’s still being billed as an MMOFPS so they’ll have to exceed 64 players per map to earn that acronym.
• During play, mercenaries earn War Points which can be used to purchase vehicles on-the-fly. Literally, as the vehicles are flown to your location via dropship. This aspect is similar to Section 8 where you earn points to spend in the purchasing menu to have custom items such as turrets, tanks, or mech-like heavy armor dropped to a location you specify.
• Each battle is obviously instanced with a population cap, but it sounds like the pre/post game lobby is a “single shard” setup like EVE where players can chat, etc.
• The final sentence in Part One implies (at least it does to me) that DUST 514 will ship with clan support in the form of Mercenary Outfits. This will be a huge boon for the game, as the only console shooter I can think of that has actual clan support is Section 8.
• CCP plans on two updates per year. Since DUST 514 will be using a microtransaction model rather than subscription, I suspect each update or expansion will be marketed as premium DLC as well but we’ll see what type of deal CCP makes with Microsoft and Sony.
• Player progression will be achieved through an “achievement matrix” unlock system which sounds like an expanded version of the Battlefield unlock scheme. (Possibly like COD too; I’ve never managed to have enough fun in COD multi-player to see any unlocks.) Some of the combo unlocks will provide persistent attribute enhancements for weapons and vehicles, which is certainly an intriguing twist.
• EVE provides DUST 514 with persistent, dynamic battlefields. The example given was that one time you fight on a certain planet it may be lush and green. Then in an EVE space battle, someone nukes the planet from orbit. The next time DUST 514 mercs fight on that planet, it will visually show the devastation from the EVE battle.

A primary concern I have for DUST 514 is how CCP integrates microtransactions. Shooters are player-skill-based games and I strongly oppose the ability to buy better weapons which hand spending players an “I Win!” button. There was already quite the upset over Battlefield Heroes raising prices and adding new weapons that have the potential to tip the balance in favor of premium players. All I’ve read so far is that they plan to sell blueprints for weapons, etc. While it is true that console players are far more accustomed to, and accepting of, microtransactions than PC players are, if the “item shop” isn’t balanced properly the console crowd may unleash an unholy Jihad of a shitstorm if they feel forced to constantly spend cash to be competitive.

Tags: DUST 514