A Review Four Years Too Late

// Filed under: Video Games on Friday October 05th 2007, 9:16 pm

A month or so ago, I had a series of interviews with Interzone Games for the position of World Designer. I didn’t get the job, unfortunately - but during the course of the interviews, I was asked to write up my thoughts on the early game experiences of some MMO’s that I had played. Only really having any substantial experience in City of Villains, and having played enough (read: ten minutes) of Ultima Online to establish that doing something so crazy as walking outside of town was a medically bad idea, I figured I may as well get the fuck over myself and sink my teeth into a trial edition of World of Warcraft. So I teamed up with the beautiful and delightful Jess, to explore the lands of Kalimdor and/or Lordaeron for the princely number of 14 days. And here is the result.

World of Warcraft is a ridiculously well-crafted game, and this much is evident right off the bat. The opening cinematic for each class is so over-the-top and clichéd that it made me choke on my tea - but I must say that I absolutely love the fact that they did it in real-time, in-engine flythroughs. I’m not usually a big fan of game introduction movies taking place in-engine, but since they already took the time to blow us away with the initial CG movie I’ll allow it. Even if that CG movie was ridiculously heavy on the hated, hated Night Elves.

I took instantly to the fantastically intuitive question and exclamation mark system. Even if you haven’t played Diablo II, which is basically where it’s lifted from, it’s a pretty universal understanding of attention and makes it very easy to see who you need to be talking to. I also really like that silver marks appear over the heads of people who have a quest for you that you’re not capable of doing yet - it’s a bit hand-holding to be sure, but that’s just what newbies need at this early game.

What is particularly annoying however is the slowly scrolling quest-text that the NPC’s dump on you - I’m a particularly fast reader in any case, but it was just agonising waiting to see what I was actually required to do. Once my friend told me about the option to turn the scrolling off, I set that straight away. I was very surprised I couldn’t just click the text to bypass the scrolling in any case, even without changing the options - it’s the logical thing to do when presenting players with a lot of unfolding information.

I also love being able to see clearly what rewards a quest offers. That’s very neat, especially being able to see when a quest’s reward is clearly not worth your time. The clear expectation and reward system is very friendly but the geographical directions could use a bit of work. There were more than a few occasions where the unclear directions and incredible sameness of the tileset confused me - and when your character is wandering on foot all the time through wilderness where impossibly unrealistic amounts of wandering cougars want to kill you, this can get pretty annoying. I’m a much bigger fan of the City of Villains approach of highlighting exactly where you need to go and telling you exactly how far away from it you are.

On the subject of exploring, I love that it rewards you with experience for travelling places and discovering things. It was a genuine pleasure in many cases to open up new areas and the incentive of bonus XP, however meagre, is very nice. I found the notion of exploring new areas much more appealing than actually taking quests in many cases, though I noticed that other people seemed to spend a much longer time grinding on mobs before moving on than I did, which seemed odd. I surmised that this may be why I was having slight amounts of difficulty taking some of the later mobs - my skipping of the exceedingly repetitive quests was coming back to haunt me.

When it comes to the subject of the quests themselves, this is where I have the most issue with the game structure. All of the early quests - and my friends tell me, most of the later quests - are basically unsubtle, blatant timesinks with little to no variation, following a very clear standard template. Some of them are really fun to do but after starting five different characters and working them to level ten or so it becomes horrendously tedious - not to mention the long periods of walking between all quests at a very, very slow pace.

Some of the class-specific quests are really excellent. I got to take part in two Shaman spirit quests and the concept and execution are really neat. It’s this sort of race/class depth that allows World of Warcraft to flex its quest muscles and do some really interesting things, and I wish they were more common instead of being forced to slaughter more respawning wildlife than the local ecosystem could possible support.

On that subject, the looting system is outrageously illogical - I need to bring someone back some boar meat and yet only one in every ten boars I casually slaughter has meat. The other nine boars are obviously made of fucking tofu or something. And especially irritating is that when you’re partying up with someone else, there’s always one of you who gets the quest items first and is then forced to follow the other one around helping them out - which is horrendously boring for all concerned. If you could share the requirements for these quests in the same way that all of you can contribute towards the X amount of Enemies killed quests, that would be fantastic. Instead you have to kill about 15 times more enemies than items you need and just hope that this tiger will actually have fur on it once it’s finally dead.

I really like the way you can share quests with others, so that they don’t have to go and pick it up from the NPC yourself. This is actually really convenient and saves a lot of time. I was slightly disappointed to note that you can’t actually complete a quest for someone else as well - this seems to me to be the logical extension of this mechanic, even if the concept is slightly abstract it would save another lot of time. Especially in partying situations where one of you needs to remain out in the wilderness because they haven’t managed to find any boars that actually had meat on them once they were dead.

I’ve noticed a lot of incongruity between the starting zones for the different races, to the extent where some of them have been really enjoyable and some of them have caused me teeth-pulling frustration. The Tauren starting zone, for example, consists of ridiculously huge expanses of plains that you need to walk across to get to your quests. This walking, which isn’t exactly helped by the horribly vague quest directions, means you’ll waste at least five minutes on every trip and end up getting attacked by every single critter that crosses your path. And the cities themselves are all up on immense, towering bluffs, which means you need to run a huge distance around them if you want to get somewhere on the other side. It’s just a huge, frustratingly designed zone and you can literally feel the hours slipping by as you plod slowly, Tauren-esquely to your destination.

On the other hand, the Troll and Orc starting zone is a positive delight. The quests themselves are slightly more varied, and much closer nearby than in the other zones. The landscape lends itself to the different quests being clumped nicely together, meaning a lot more can be accomplished in a shorter time, and the distances between places of interest are short enough to make walking between them a pleasant distraction rather than the chore it is in other zones. And pleasingly, there is a nice flow to the landscape meaning the eye is drawn to the paths you need to take, unlike the Dwarf zone for example where the incredible sameness of the snow-covered terrain led to Jess and I getting lost on a number of occasions.

Another thing that I found particularly frustrating was the lack of directions inside of the major cities. It was impossible to discover quickly where you need to be if it is your first time there because there is absolutely no direction. Want to find a shaman trainer in Orgrimmar? Why not wander from area to area, each filled with dozens of buildings and NPCs until you chance across the right one? I guess you could always ask somebody but the chat window is filled with hundreds of screeching morons hocking their wares. It’s simply frustrating and coming from a City of Villains system where all I have to do is open up the map, click on the NPC I want and then quickly fly over there, it was terribly frustrating for me.

What I took away most from my two-week World of Warcraft experience was a sensation of being stuck in a well-crafted, well-designed and beautifully detailed timesink. I found a lot to like about the game and the world, and I can very much see the appeal in playing with a large group of friends, but the phenomenal patience required to grind your way through the unsubtle repetition of it all, even at introductory levels, left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It was a pleasingly easy game to get to grips with and has taught me a lot about the nature of the early game hook – but it was a hook that in this instance I found all too easy to avoid. Everything I tried seemed like aesthetic variations on a theme, and though that is true to say of most other MMO’s I have played as well, the mechanics of that variation were just not enough to keep me interested.

// 5 Comments

In Which Gaming Is Discussed

// Filed under: Video Games, Life on Tuesday June 12th 2007, 9:30 pm

For the last three days, I have been unable to stop thinking about how much I want to play Mario Strikers Charged.

That sounds retarded I know, but I played it for maybe a mere half an hour at Felix’s going-away party and am absolutely entranced. The ridiculously intuitive gameplay grabbed me by the metaphorical testicles from the first minute, and with only the most basic knowledge of the controls I was able to pass, charge and tackle like a maniac.

Even a half an hour in, I could easily pick out the levels of gameplay and tactics that were shining through, and the merits of team selection and captaincy. It was such a beautiful thing. Everything about the game has a tangible impact. Even the most basic tackle, the simplest steal, shakes the screen with a grinding, slow-motion impact that makes you want to do it again and again and again. When you make a particularly great tackle, or you fire off a beautifully charged shot that the game thinks will probably cannon into the back of the net - the game time slows to a crawl, the interface vanishes and you get to see your play happen in deliciously slow motion, successful or not.

You can feel the crunch as Wario puts his boot into the face of an unsuspecting Shy Guy. You can hold your breath as your shot careens towards the goal at crawl speed, and the whole room can groan in frustration as the goalie picks it effortlessly out of the air. Then it’s game time again, and you’re passing the ball around like a maniac and shooting and screaming and sighing and it’s so freaking seamless that it feels like every pass, every shot, every tackle is a part of your motherfucking soul.

I’m not kidding. This game has crawled beneath my goddamn skin in less than half an hour. I don’t know what it is, but I am more excited about this game than I have been about any Wii game so far. It could be the thing - the thing other than sweet, sweet Super Smash Bros. Brawl - that actually rekindles my long-flagging interest in this console. I can’t wait to get a copy of my own and experiment with team selection, power-ups and special moves. I can’t wait to play the free online mode against my friends.

I can’t wait for Simon to finish his motherfucking exams so we can beat the unholy shit out of this game without it distracting him. Study, you bastard. I know you’re reading this.

Speaking of untidy segues, talking with Ross in the car on the way home from the Perthcomics meet last night really made me miss the days of the old RIFTS and Palladium games. Ross has just been hired to re-write Cyberpunk - not the genre, the actual game - had his own system published (the Awesome system), and is basically living the beautiful dream of the writer.

Damn you, Ross. You and your stories, they make me miss the good days. The days when I would craft what were probably terrible stories, put on terrible Dwarven accents, and let Jimi critical-hit a motherfucking baelrog for ((6D6+8)*2)*2 motherfucking damage direct to its hit points* because goddamn that shit is just cool. I’d love to GM again. I love telling stories. I’m probably rusty as fuck now, but hey.

I guess it’s just another thing to stack on top of the already overloaded pile of things-I-wish-I-had-the-goddamn-time-for. Sigh.

*This actually happened.

// 6 Comments

On the Redundancy of Player Choice

// Filed under: Video Games on Wednesday February 28th 2007, 11:46 am

I’ve been thinking recently, about some of the things I experienced while playing Splinter Cell: Double Agent a couple of months back.

The level in question begins with Sam Fisher hurling himself out of a helicopter, to parachute down onto a glacier. Simple stuff perhaps, for a veteran agent of an elite black ops unit. Not so. In fact, his parachute gets stuck, and who should come to his rescue? Why, me of course. Tim! I hear you cry. You’re an unfit nerd! How can you possibly help? Ah, but the answer is simple, my friends.

I hit the space bar.

Yes, seriously. I hit the space bar. If I don’t hit it, veteran black ops agent Sam Fisher will plummet to a loud, sudden and above all cold death. So here, as a player, is my choice. Hit the space bar, or die. That’s it. If I do not hit the space bar, my mission will end messily before it has even begun.

Some levels later, I am in a helicopter being airlifted to the roof of a skyscraper. Gasp! The pilot collapses with no explanation given. Once again it’s Tim to the rescue, as Sam Fisher rushes to the controls of the aircraft. But Tim, you pipe up once again. You’re not qualified to pilot a helicopter! Ah, but I am, my friends. Because you see, all I need to do to make sure I can actually get on with my mission and not die, is this:

Wildly hit the directional keys.

Like a peppered ferret, I smack the directional keys until the helicopter rights itself and I can actually begin my mission. If I don’t, of course, I can gleefully sit and watch as the helicopter fireballs into the side of the building and I die. The first time, this happened, with the parachutes - I didn’t really think about it. The second time, with the helicopter, I stopped the game for a second, and I thought to myself - what the fuck is going on.

If I do not hit the space bar - if I do not wildly smack the directional keys - I will die. As a player, I can choose to perform a menial action, or watch my character die and be forced to reload and face the same choice again. Because that’s what it is all about, you see. It’s about choice.

When you offer a player a choice, you are saying to the player: you are in control. What you are about to do matters. This is what creates immersion. This is what creates great, memorable experiences that people will talk about.

When you make it abundantly clear to that player that their choice is not only irrelevant to the outcome - but that there is only one viable outcome - you throw all that back in their face. You are saying to the player “I don’t need you”. Why give a player this choice if you can only end up insulting them? Why would I ever, ever, choose to die. Why do I even have the option to choose to live?

I can see the merit, when a player must use their reflexes, memory, skills, strategy etc, to forge the difference between life and death in a video game. I can see the merit when I die and I know that if I was just a little more skilled, I could have made a difference.

Where I can’t see the merit is in making a player perform a menial, unskilled action just so that they can actually play the game they just purchased. Wouldn’t it have been easier to incorporate this into a menu choice? Begin level? Y/N? Y. Open parachute? Y/N?

While I was discussing this on the Gamer’s Quarter forums some time back, Harveyjames mentioned the game Just Cause as an example of what a reasonable parachute-opening choice should mean. While parachuting in Just Cause, for example, the time at which you open the parachute will determine where in the level you land, meaning you can make an actual difference in how you expedite your goals within that level. In Double Agent, the result is not quite so variable. You land at the same place, regardless of whether you open your parachute or not - it’s just in one of these scenarios, you hit the ground a with a bit more finality.

Of course, it would be naive to think Double Agent is the only game guilty of this. In X-Men: Legends, any sort of chasm or cliff ledge is a guaranteed death-trap for a player anxious to test their supposed flying skills. In Golden Sun, sweet Golden Sun for my GameBoy Advance, every second conversation with an NPC offered you the chance to agree or disagree with their sentiments. Of course, the only change this made was in the immediately subsequent dialogue, as they ended up convincing you to do what the story wanted you to do anyway.

But in Double Agent - shiny, new herald of the Splinter Cell line, promising me unrivalled immersion and the ability to play both sides in a dangerous game where the lines of morality are blurred and every choice I make determines one of a number of outcomes… I find myself having to press the space bar so that I can open a goddamn parachute.

This is not immersion. This is not player choice. This is a player being forced to acknowledge that what they are contributing is token and unnecessary. A freedom that you can never choose is not a freedom. It is an insult, it is a frustration and most of it all it is plain bad design.

// 5 Comments

Whee Wii

// Filed under: Video Games on Monday November 27th 2006, 8:03 pm

I am playing a lot of video games lately. I will write about them soon.

However, recently (tonight) I was lucky enough to get invited by my friend Jon to his friend’s house, who is also called Tim, to play his imported Wii. Of course, the Wii comes out here in just over a week. And it’s been out in everywhere else for over a week. So go figure. But there you are.

I managed to have a go of Wii Sports, Zelda: Twilight Princess and get a good look at Red Steel being played, as well as flick through the Wii’s internal management system for channels, mail messages, calendar and so on. My initial thoughts are as follows. First of all, the Wii internal menu.

Slick. Slick but a bit clunky. Very easy to use, very clean, very iPod aesthetic. But some definite problem areas. Like, for example, entering any text into the system. You have to use the Wiimote to point at letters on a qwerty-keyboard superimposed on screen. This is exceedingly slow. It was pointed out several times that somewhere on the internet it was proven to be quicker to grab a whiteboard marker, and scrawl your message on the side of the console. I believe this to be true.

The other main problem is the Wii interfaces in general, both inside of games and out. Everything is controlled by pointing the Wiimote, at the moment. Now I could perhaps put this down to new-control-method-frenzy, where developers need to use the system’s new abilities for as much as possible, but the fact of the matter is, this is simply not intuitive. If they’d mapped it to the Nunchuk’s thumbstick, we could all be living in happy land. Up down left right. Navigate through a menu. It’s genius. As it stands, using the Wiimote to point and click your way through menus will probably become easier with practice, but it need not even be an issue if they’d left it alone.

Moving onto Wii Sports. This game is genius. I was only able to play Wii Tennis and see Wii Boxing in action, but both were instantly playable and very intuitive. Wii Tennis in particular was smooth and delightful. No update lag at all - the timing’s not quite logical, but it works easily and I enjoyed it a lot. Wii Boxing, a lot weirder. Difficult from what I saw for people to get the timing and directions right for the swings they wanted. Still a lot of positive feedback.

Twilight Princess. Having played the E3 demo at the stores recently I was already slightly familiar so I handed it off to Jon to play. He ran through the first twenty minutes or so of the introduction. It was fairly graphically chunky and had a definite “This was nothing that couldn’t be done on the GameCube” aesthetic, but it was still charming and very pleasing. Though there was no combat in the intro, as Link is still bereft of sword, I’ll talk about the combat I played in the stores - odd. Odd in that the motions of the Wiimote are used to determine the swinging of the sword. It works but it takes a little bit to wrap your head around. Once, I ended up stabbing a guy behind me. Somehow. Don’t ask me. Archery was a delight with the Wiimote. Difficult at first but easy to get used to - my first time around I was a festival of inaccuracy, but the second time I whipped out the bow I picked off five random enemies in quick succession.

My final experience of the night was Red Steel. This one I have some severe reservations about. First of all, the menu system. Un. In. Tuitive. Secondly, the art style and “intro movie”, if you can call it that - just plain rubs me the wrong way. I can see the merit in what they’re trying to attempt - the replication of a Japanese comic book but it just doesn’t work and I didn’t like it at all. That, and the stilted introduction sequence with the horrible dialogue, and retarded controller calibration sequence, which forces you to point the Wiimote at fish in order that it can set the level of sensitivity based on your position.

I was watching Anthony play. Later I would determine via the Wii’s internal systems that he had played for a mere nine minutes. This is a short amount of time. However I would like to add that after nine minutes, he spent the majority of his gunfights staring at the ceiling or spinning wildly in circles as the Wiimote exploded in confusion. The times when he did get it working it was really smooth and I can see how it could all work. But the one thing that I took away was that Red Steel would appear to have a very large learning curve. Much more than I would have expected for the Wii’s “pick up and play” ethos that they’re promoting, for sure.

My overall impression of the Wii is very mixed at this point in time. I can see the potential. I can really see the potential. And I think if it’s exploited properly, Nintendo is onto a real winner.

But at this point in time, if Simon hadn’t already pre-ordered a Wii, and hadn’t agreed to chip in, chances are I probably wouldn’t have bought one quite yet. Jon and I were discussing this on the drive back, and he said something that I really agree with - it took at least 6 months after Nintendo threw a stylus onto their GameBoy DS before developers really started to get the knack of using it properly.

I think this will be very much the same. I think the launch games will be good - I can see myself enjoying them, with perhaps the exception of Red Steel. But I think it’ll be quite some months before games are released that really show us what the Wii can do.

P.S. I also saw Gears of War being played for the first time. I can see what the hype is about - this is a really, really polished game. It’s not terribly innovative but it drips committment, love and hours of work by Epic going into it, not only graphically but in terms of sheer atmosphere. It wouldn’t surprise me if they hired a team of people to do camera work alone. It’s not hard to understand why Microsoft are so hot for turning this into a trilogy - if every game in this franchise could ooze this amount of polish, it’d basically be a license to print money. This is rapidly getting a reputation as the Halo 2 of the XBox 360 - the game you buy a console just to play and honestly, though it’s not for me, I’d be lying if I said a small part of me that was all too admiring of Microsoft’s approach to gaming wasn’t severely tempted.

// 1 Comment

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