Pumping Irony

Three months and one week after placing the order for all the parts for the new PC, it’s finally working!

Other than the Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS, it’s decidedly a last-gen (ie. DirectX10) system for now. The new DX11 cards were tempting but I’m simply not willing to spend that much just for a video card any more. On a side note, I find it interesting that when I was younger and living paycheck to paycheck I had no problem sacrificing and saving up for the brand-new hardware and now that I can afford it without batting an eyelash, I have a difficult time justifying it. My PC gaming is pretty much relegated to MMOG’s only now, and I think 2009 painted a grim picture for how I am feeling about the MMOG genre as a whole in its current state. At “bleeding edge tech” prices, a DX11 card just isn’t worth it for MMOG’s alone, to me.

This PC has been nothing but trouble from the moment it was assembled, so it was with great joy Monday afternoon when it finally booted up and Windows 7 was installed. After installing drivers and a few other applications, I naturally set out to get my MMO on. Age of Conan was first since it had less updating to do than LOTRO, which took all night to finish updating through two expansions and content patches.

So yesterday I’m enjoying the new PC, it’s noticeably faster overall and games were running faster, yet I’ll admit to being disappointed that I wasn’t seeing quite the speed increase in the two MMO’s. I could tell they were running smoother but I was only getting +10-ish frames per second more than the previous PC. That just didn’t sound right. Not to mention I have a DX11 OS and DX10 video card, yet the DX10 option was greyed-out in both games. Something was amiss. I know AoC is a resource hog but I was expecting to be able to crank up the graphic settings more than I was able to. Didn’t stop me from playing several hours and it was far more stable (from a playability, not technical, standpoint) than it had been but there was still a deep-felt sense of disappointment of “nearly $1,000 and this is all I have to show for it?”

So I made a few comments along those lines on Twitter yesterday and some of the gang went about trying to find out specifically how to enable my DX10 options. Unfortunately none of them worked, for a very special level of noobness on my part, but I want to specifically thank Openedge1, BlueKae and Avery78 for their help looking into the problem. Openedge was even digging through the LOTRO forums looking for solutions — and he utterly despises LOTRO and everything about it — so a special thanks for your efforts, Edge. We’d covered everything from multiple installs of the ATI Catalyst 10.2 drivers, multiple installs of the DirectX Web Setup, checking compatibility settings on the .exe files, and checking a few configuration files, all to no avail.

With great horror and shame, I finally discovered the problem. As I said, this was an entirely new realm of noobness and hell, it’s just embarrassing. Edge tried to get me to fess up and I said “no way!” Then thinking about it, not only does it give me an excuse to write something on my somewhat-neglected blog here but also it’s healthy to be able to laugh at yourself. So here’s the brief history of the past 3 months wrestling with this beast.

I placed the order for the parts on December 1 but it was probably the third week of December before I had a chance to assemble everything and run into the first hitch. It all started with the motherboard’s power LED lighting up but nothing else would turn on. No fans, nothing, and it certainly wasn’t going to consider booting. Turns out I’d had the cables to the power switch, etc. installed vertically like they were on the previous motherboard rather than horizontally. Then again, the manual for my previous motherboard had illustrations and the new one does not, so it took a couple weeks to discover that mistake. It’s mid-January at this point.

Now we’ve got full power to the system. Pressing the power button brought life to all sorts of fans and LED’s and… that was all. No signal to the monitor and from the lack of any sounds other than fans (ie. hard drives, etc.) the system didn’t seem to actually be doing anything resembling booting up. Argh! Is the video card faulty? The monstrous fan came on so it’s getting power so perhaps the GPU is bad? Or is it the motherboard that’s malfunctioning? Maybe it’s just the PCI-X slot? Unlike the other parts, I ordered the video card — an ATI Radeon 4890 HD (my first ATI ever) — back in July after reading Openedge gush about it. So now my freshly-opened video card was well beyond the 30 day return point and I was going to have to spend more cash having it replaced if it came to that.

Over the next couple weeks I did a little troubleshooting [make a note of this, it will be important soon] I learned that there was an extremely high probability that I was one of several customers who ordered this particular motherboard and CPU as a combo package from Newegg, only to discover that the BIOS had not been updated to actually support the CPU yet, preventing the system from booting at all. Hey, that sounds familiar, no? It’s mid-February now, and I spent nearly a week playing phone tag with people from Asus but finally having them send me a replacement BIOS chip (free but I had to pay shipping). The Fedex tracker says it’s going to arrive the first day of my next trip so I took the morning off work so the chip wouldn’t be sitting outside. I hung around the condo all morning but lunch time I was starving so I ran out for 20 minutes and left a note on the door for the Fedex guy. Anyone care to guess when he shows up? Yep! Exactly while I’m out. Oh, and unlike UPS, Fedex pretty much refuses to just leave your packages for you, even if you sign a note for them. Seriously, do they just expect everyone to stay holed up in their homes every second of the day awaiting their arrival with bated breath? I called the support number and in between ripping the girl a new one was informed that no, the driver could not simply come back (he’s only been gone a few minutes, grrrrr!) and I’ll need to sign the door sticker card he left in order for him to leave it. Great! Now I’ve taken unpaid time off work for no reason and the BIOS chip will be sitting outside anyway!

So, I get home Sunday night and sure enough, there was a Fedex package waiting. I dig into things Monday and learn I don’t have space to do the small screwdriver trick to remove the old BIOS chip. I’m going to need to buy an IC removal tool. Crap. I drove to three different stores and no one has one for sale. Crap. So I lugged the case to my car and drove to SmartPC and paid the owner $15 to replace the BIOS for me. Just to be certain it would work, he offered to power the system up to make sure I had a monitor signal and the motherboard would attempt to boot. Sounded good to me. So he plugs in the power cable to the video card then lugged it over to the monitor. I told him there were two power inputs, not just one. He stopped and double-checked and told me no, just the one. A little red flag went up in the back of my mind because I remembered full well that the 4890 had two PCI-E plugs, but hey, he’s the owner of a shop that does nothing but build computers; he should know his stuff right? Sure enough, the BIOS update was all it took so I happily paid the man, shrugged off his jokes about how messy my PSU was (seriously people, no matter how good the price may be, do not ever get a non-modular PSU) drove back home and excitedly installed Windows 7 which brings us back to the beginning of this article and trying to discover why DX10 options were disabled in my brand-new PC.

Remember a few paragraphs ago where I said I had attempted to troubleshoot why there was no signal to the monitor? Part of that troubleshooting involved replacing the new ATI 4890 with my old Nvidia 7950GT to see if a card I knew worked would have the same problem. Partly because I was still wondering if I was going to have to send my 4890 back for replacement and mostly out of disgust and dismay for the whole situation, I never put the 4890 back in! By the time the BIOS was replaced I had completely forgotten about it and thought it was good to go, 4890 and all. That explains the red flag for the guy saying my video card only had one power input. Naturally, having a DX9 card in the PC guarantees that all DX10 options will be disabled as well…

Like I said, that was a whole new level of noobishness!

All is well now. The 4890 is installed, and DX10 has become available. I haven’t gotten around to installing image editing and FTP software yet so I’ll have to wait until next week or so (rough schedule this month so “or so” is likely) to post screenshots.

I fired up LOTRO and… honestly couldn’t tell any difference. I thought there were supposed to be all kinds of shaders for even better-looking water but it looked the same as it has since launch. I finally noticed that the branches of all the trees in Lothlorien cast shadows on the ground and followed the light sources, which doesn’t happen in DX9. However, in short order every fan in my case was running on overdrive. So, for now, back to DX9 for LOTRO. It isn’t worth sitting next to a turbojet engine just for tree shadows and extra-hitchy movement through Middle Earth. Seriously, what is with that game’s engine? They really need to look at changing the tech for pre-caching textures, etc.

Then I logged into Age of Conan. Character select screen shows up and of course I have an even higher framerate while my Bear Shaman impatiently shifts from foot to foot waiting for me to log him into the world. So I oblige him. I think I bruised my jaw when it dropped onto the desk. This is my first time seeing what DX10 can really do live and in-person. Welcome to 2007 right? Whatever! Age of Conan was already a good-looking game in DX9 but had the type of art and textures that could look fairly ugly at times when some options were scaled down. DX10 is night and day, and Age of Conan’s graphics truly shine. Performance is noticeably better with the default DX10 settings and I’m sure with tweaking I can get even better framerate without detracting too much from the gorgeous visuals.

So a year after I started saying I’d build a new PC, 8 months after buying the video card, and 3 months after initially assembling the new PC… I have a new PC! :grin:

I’ve been very curious on people’s opinions on this, so I installed a poll plugin so I could ask. I’m hoping I did this correctly…

Many of us loved BioWare’s recent epic fantasy adventure RPG Dragon Age: Origins and lamented that it was a single-player only game.

So my question to you is: Would you play and enjoy a multiplayer cooperative Dragon Age RPG if it continued to use the same control scheme as found in Origins?

What I’m getting at is DA:O is fairly traditional in the you, the player, issue commands, including movement, etc. to the character(s) and they follow those commands. The closest multiplayer game I can think of would be Guild Wars where your character will move to points or enemies, and will continue to follow if the enemy runs (ie. mobs can and will kite you if you let them). Would this be acceptable in a Dragon Age multiplayer RPG or since you would only be actively controlling a single character, would you prefer more direct interaction of that character, such as you’d see in an MMORPG?

This question is based on the stance that pausing a multiplayer game is out of the question, so the pause mechanic would be disabled during multiplayer, which means the skill selection, etc. UI would be during live play. I’m only curious about preferences for the actual direct control of your single character in co-op versus the traditional RPG controls found in DA:O.

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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… :mad:

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 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.

Horrible pun. HORRIBLE! But it’s staying anyway.

gPotato has their new F2P MMORPG, Allods Online, entering Phase 2 of Closed Beta. Graphically, it looks appealing enough though I’m wary of gPotato’s item shops from past experience but I’m willing to install the full game just to check it out once it’s launched.

Still, is it completely wrong that I have an automatic bias against Allods simply because of two bloggers?

Heartless_ has been raving about Allods but I fear I haven’t quite gotten over his stint as a pre-launch WAR fanboy. I know I should give him the benefit of the doubt “live and learn” thing, but the WAR fanboy effect is still there in the back of my mind.

Second, Keen of Keen and Graev’s has also been raving about Allods. It’s difficult to give Keen the benefit of the doubt because I have yet to ever read that he has “lived and learned.” Keen is notorious for “this next game that isn’t out [AoC/WAR/Darkfall/Mortal Online/whatever] will be the most awesome MMO EVAR!!!” yet within a month he’s canceled, writing how much the game sucks then immediately jumping onto the fanboy bandwagon of whatever other new shiny MMO looms on the horizon.

As I said, I’ll likely check out the final game but it’s nothing I’d stick with. It’s just another F2P DIKU-based MMORPG with two factions, the same ol’ leveling and questing and classes as every other DIKU-based MMORPG. Runes of Magic has possibly the least offensive of the Asian-style item shops, while DDO possibly has the most appealing overall for us Western players. I’m not entirely trusting of gPotato’s mentality of item shops but we’ll see what, if anything, they’ve learned in the past year or two of a handful of AAA-quality F2P titles seeing a measure of success outside the Asian market.

I’ve been bitching for a few months on Twitter about the extremely unstable state of my PC, but I haven’t been in the mood for any PC gaming at all, so I’ve just let it go. I’m slowly getting back in the mood to play a single MMOG — which will be LOTRO, naturally — and maybe a couple other normal games.

This all started awhile back when I first had the bright idea that maybe I’d upgrade my PC this fall, so I went ahead and bought an ATI 4890 card. Unable to resist temptation, I popped it into my existing system and all hell broke loose. RAM chips spontaneously flash-fried themselves and things in general just stopped working. I had to cut the power several times — while the PC was booted — just to get any control over the system. I eventually put the crusty ol’ 7950GT back in, which is still in today, but I can never trust the system to work correctly, even when it seems things are ok.

Random apps will crash; sometimes it’s a browser (or all browsers); sometimes apps simply won’t load; sometimes I’ll get a memory error or a .dll not found error; sometimes it decides during booting it’s discovered major errors on the hard drive so it runs CHKDSK. Despite saying quite plainly on the screen that the disk check can be canceled, this is a blatant lie, as it refuses to respond to any input whatsoever.

Yesterday I had an all-out battle when it rebooted itself for no apparent reason, then for over an hour decided that the 7950GT could only handle a maximum of 640×480, 4-bit color. It took several (yes, several) vanilla boots into Safe Mode and re-installing NVidia drivers before finally the thing booted back into native resolution, mere nanoseconds before my head would have physically exploded and my body would have alighted with hellfire as I summoned the minions of Satan himself as my black temper consumed the last vestiges of humanity — and, indeed, sanity — to utterly destroy the misbehaving electronics causing me such stress. Think I’m exaggerating, do you? Ha! You mortals…

Games can get interesting when the system otherwise appears to be “normal” for a change. I apparently lost (or failed to take) screenshots in Guild Wars where enemy 3D models were replaced with white 2D bitmaps. It was like fighting swarms of blind (they had no eyes, after all) Spongebob Squarepants. On the one hand, I could see those white squares from miles away so there was no hiding from my party’s wrath, but on the other hand it was quite immersion-breaking. Feel my QQ! Sorry, I just love poking fun at the Immersionites out there. :wink:

The one that truly scared the shit out of me was a few weeks ago I decided to check back into LOTRO to see if I was ready to start thinking about MMOG’s at all again. I logged in (it was one of those rare occasions that the unstable system didn’t crash the client), was happily chatting with a few friends and kin-mates then decided to hop on my horse and ride around to do a quest. The icon for my mount was missing. What the hell? My finger stretched up to click the ‘i’ key to bring up the inventory, where I would just click the mount icon itself, only to my horror the inventory was empty! I had nothing! Had my account been hacked? Amid my panic, a few neurons managed to fire and I realized that if my account had in fact been hacked, the password would have been changed and most likely the characters would have been deleted and totally naked. Arwellyn was still wearing her gear and not shaming the elves of Middle-earth by parading around in front of dwarves — dwarves! — in her unmentionables. A few reboots later to get apps (including the LOTRO client) to stop crashing, it was just a graphical glitch where no item icons would load.

I did manage to get two glitched LOTRO screenshots recently:

My client refused to load anyone’s mount graphics, but the mounts themselves worked fine. Everyone was just gliding bow-legged through the air. Amusing, but aggravating nonetheless.

Running around the Ettenmoors, none of the distance imposters in the entire zone worked, they just showed up as glitchy bitmaps. When I was in range of the model they were replacing, the imposter-to-model transition worked fine.

I’ve just about had it, though. Especially after fighting with it yesterday and my temper very nearly getting the best of me and unleashing a severe bout of violence upon the offending electronics, which as you know never accomplishes the desired effect. I was hoping to hold off until the holidays were over but I think I’m going to end up spending some money this week and ordering the remaining parts to build a new Windows 7 64-bit system…

This actually comes from a console gaming perspective, specifically, but also something I’ve vaguely noticed in the MMOG crowd at times.

Why are co-operative games (let’s just call it PvE for familiarity’s sake, because that’s what it is) not considered multiplayer? It seems only the competitive (PvP) side of a game is “multiplayer” at all.

Whether I have 4 players playing co-operatively in Borderlands or 12 people raiding in LOTRO, is 4 or 12 not multiple players?

Taking it to the next step, would an MMO that had no form of PvP whatsoever in fact not be an MMO since apparently PvE doesn’t count, regardless how many players there actually may be doing it?

I’m just sayin’ …

I didn’t see this making the rounds in my little corner of the blogosphere so I’ll do it myself.

The two following clips are some shakycam footage taken during Fanfest ‘09 featuring some Dust 514 live gameplay.

Combat Gameplay

3D Lobby

So. There it is.

I’m loving the weapon graphics and the reloading animations, but I’m underwhelmed with the look of the world, from the terrain to the urban features. For all I keep hearing about EVE’s PvP being about tactics and such, Dust 514 looks like yet another One Man Army FPS.

In fact, from the art and graphics to the arcadey gameplay, it looks like CCP just invented Halo 3! I wonder if they’ve ever heard of Bungie? :eek: