And boy is it glorious. The game stands out as my favorite title of 2011 (yes, even above Skyrim), and if you haven’t played it yet, I highly recommend it. Enjoy the trailer below

Note 2: Part I can be found here. It contains our adventures with Lucifron and Ragnaros in The Molten Core. And our run-ins with the World Bosses. This is a 3-part series.

Molten Core… For a Price

Around the time that the Ahn’Qiraj patch announced, we decided for a multitude of reasons to switch servers. Bloodhoof was severely over-populated, and Blizzard has just initiated free transfers to a new server: Eitrigg. The move itself was fairly drama-free, with over 95% of the guild deciding to move together. We were sick of the server, and this one bully guild that trolled the hell out of everyone on the server. I am not denying that they were the top-ranked guild, and well-organized. I am just saying you don’t have to be an absolute dick about it.

So we transferred, and with us transferred two other Alliance guilds that we had close working relationships with, Harbingers of Death (HoD) and MUSA. I had forged a stable and mutually beneficial partnership with the leaders of both guilds and we shared resources and participated in World Boss kills together on occasion. For example, if they got legendary pieces, we would let them borrow Elementium Ore on faith, and vice versa.

The Ahn’Qiraj patch was still a few weeks out, and that was problematic because we had started to get a little tired of farming Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. With interest quickly waning in the two raid instances, I got my team of officers together for some brainstorming about how to keep the raiding game alive long enough to go at Ahn’Qiraj with the proper numbers. That week, a member of HoD asked me if their alt could tag along in our Molten Core run. He had been away that week, and had missed their own guild’s Molten Core run. 60-70% of the drop were getting disenchanted in the Molten Core anyway, so after consulting with the officers, I decided to let him. This individual offered 1K gold if his item dropped in the Core. The item dropped, the 1K gold was split between the 28 or so people that were present for the raid, and that gave me an idea.

The following day I made a post on the server forums saying that our guild would be running Molten Core and Blackwing Lair to help gear up players and their alts for a price. All they would have to do was show up, and we would farm the gear for them for a certain price. I set up an auction system, where they had until an hour before the raid to bid on items that were not needed by the guild. I would consider all bids before 6 pm server time, make a list of all the individuals with top bids that we would need to take with us, and enter the Core promptly at 7 pm.

That first week, we made nearly 7K from the Molten Core alone, and 7K gold in vanilla WoW days was an incredible amount of in-game doubloons. This led to BWL farm raids as well, and before I knew it, the guild’s raiders crawled back out of their hiding places, and we had full 40-man teams clearing the Molten Core and Blackwing Lair on a weekly basis until Patch 1.9: The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj.

The Beginning of the Qiraji Conflict

*How I Met Your Mother impersonation*: Kids, in the winter of 2006, Patch 1.9 finally hit, and all manner of pissed off Qiraji warriors started pouring out of the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj and infecting Azeroth. This was a great event for many reasons, poor implementation and unforeseen server crashes notwithstanding. First, the guild was hungry for new content; little did they know that the content would kick their ass into oblivion, but hey, at last we had something new and interesting to do. Second, the opening of the gates was an epic event. There were cross-continent quests, feats that needed to be completed in large numbers, and an invasion of Silithus and adjoining areas by innumerable Qiraji and their allies for us to fight off.

The quest involved building the Scepter of the Sifting Sands, which in turn required tracking down the Red, Blue and Green shards (each with their own quest lines). This scepter was then used to bang a gong outside the gates, triggering a 10-hour event. And this was the easy part.

The tough part was gathering the war supplies. Both sides needed together a certain amount of materials and submit them to NPCs in order to be able to count towards the server total. When all materials would be submitted, which, on some servers could take several (real-time) months. The necessary supplies were as follows (pilfered from WoWWiki):

Both factions need to gather:

• 90,000 x Copper Bar (1 Signet)
• 26,000 x Purple Lotus (7 Signets)
• 80,000 x Thick Leather (7 Signets)
• 17,000 x Spotted Yellowtail (7 Signets)
• 400,000 x Runecloth Bandage (10 Signets)

The Alliance needs to gather in the Military Ward of Ironforge:

• 28,000 x Iron Bar (5 Signets)
• 24,000 x Thorium Bar (10 Signets)
• 20,000 x Arthas’ Tears (10 Signets)
• 33,000 x Stranglekelp (3 Signets)
• 180,000 x Light Leather (1 Signet)
• 110,000 x Medium Leather (3 Signets)
• 20,000 x Roast Raptor (5 Signets)
• 14,000 x Rainbow Fin Albacore (3 Signets)
• 800,000 x Linen Bandage (1 Signet)
• 600,000 x Silk Bandage (5 Signets)

The Horde needs to gather in The Valley of Spirits in Orgrimmar:

• 22,000 x Tin Bar (3 Signets)
• 18,000 x Mithril Bar (7 Signets)
• 96,000 x Peacebloom (1 Signet)
• 19,000 x Firebloom (5 Signets)
• 60,000 x Heavy Leather (5 Signets)
• 60,000 x Rugged Leather (10 Signets)
• 10,000 x Lean Wolf Steak (1 Signets)
• 10,000 x Baked Salmon (10 Signets)
• 250,000 x Wool Bandage (3 Signets)
• 250,000 x Mageweave Bandage (7 Signets)

These signets would then be turned into NPCs on both sides. Once all supplies were complete, both factions would start sending troops to Silithus for the war, and over the course of five real-time days, you could see supplies dwindling in the two faction cities as the armies marches on Ahn’Qiraj.

Only then could you use the aforementioned scepter to bang the gong, crack the Scarab Wall, and open the Ahn’Qiraj gates. The person with the gong would get a legendary Qiraji mount, mostly one per faction. If you had a complete scepter, you could hit the gong again and get your own mount, but only within the 10-hour event window of hitting the gong for the first time. Given the pain involved in completing the scepter, this was mostly limited to one person per server. Now that is truly a legendary achievement, to be the proud owner of a mount that only one person on the entire server could obtain. On Eitrigg, this honor belonged to a Paladin from Harbingers of Death, though I can’t, for the life of me, recall his name anymore. I mean this was six years ago!

And then you could finally get into the 20-man (Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj) and the 40-man (Temple of Ahn’Qiraj) and test your skill against the best the Silithid had to offer. It was a colossal event, one that required not only the guild to come together, but also required coordination with the Horde side for completing the war effort quests. It was a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our resources. But we banded together, as we had against every challenge thrown at us since launch, and we went on to conquer both instances, all the way to that sonofabitch C’Thun!

Perhaps it is time to invest in the Razer Naga, because frankly, there are just too many keys to press as a hunter at WoW endgame, the only MMO I am playing with some level of consistency.

But maybe, in the interests of providing some context, I should explain how I use my keyboard.

The Rules

There are a few rules for me when I set up my keyboard to play any particular game.

1. There should be as few keys as possible
2. The keys should be in close proximity
3. I should be able to press Alt to change the function of a key completely.

The Primary Keys

The traditional bar (which I don’t use), allows you 12 keys, ’1′ all the way to ‘=’. This clearly violates rule # 2, so the most I will work with is six keys. Since the ‘`’ key is not used in the original game, this makes ‘`’ through ’5′ usable.

I also use the ‘Q’ and ‘E’ keys, while ‘WASD’ are used for strafing and lateral movement.

‘F4′ through ‘F9′ are used for ‘Trap Launcher’ and the five subsequent traps respectively. ‘F5′ has ‘Freeze Trap’ on it. The logic is that in the heat of battle, I can hit ‘F4′ (easy to find), then ‘F5′ (next to it after a dip) without having to look at my keyboard.

‘X’ is used for autorun.

The built-in shortcuts for various WoW menus and interface panels remain largely untouched.

The Alt Key

I also use the Alt key to completely change another key. For example, pressing ‘E’ normally triggers ‘Rapid Fire’. Pressing alt changes ‘E’ to ‘Readiness’. It makes sense two me because these two abilities are used closest together in a raid environment. The same logic applies to several other keys. For example, ’4′ fires ‘Chimera Shot’. Pressing alt changes this to ‘Serpent Sting’. So you press alt to cast ‘Serpent Sting’ once, and then release alt and over the course of the fight, press ’4′ to cast ‘Chimera Shot’, which refreshes ‘Serpent Sting’. The following macro makes this work:

#showtooltip [nomod] Chimera Shot; [mod:alt] Serpent Sting
/targetenemy [noharm]
/petattack [@target,exists]
/petfollow [@target,noexists]
/use [nomod] Chimera Shot; [mod:alt] Serpent Sting;

The lines regarding the pet simply directs my pet to attack the target I am attacking. This is rolled into about every ability to ensure they assist me every time. I find the pet bar option to be unreliable.

The Mouse

Left, Right and Middle buttons are a given. I also have two side buttons on my mouse, so both of those buttons ‘B4′ and ‘B5′ also get used. Using the alt and ctrl keys transforms these two buttons into six buttons. For example, my “survival” abilities are ties to ‘Button 5′.

‘Button 5′ = Disengage (used most often)
Alt + ‘Button 5′ = Feign Death
Ctrl + ‘Button 5′ = Deterrance

Clique Mod

In addition to this, I also use Clique mod, and some of my abilities are directly programmed into it, for example, alt-clicking any portrait will cast ‘Mend Pet’ on my current pet. Middle clicking on any portrait will cast ‘Misdirect’ on that person.

Here is a screenshot of my keyboard set-up:

I hope the commentary above now makes sense with this.

The following are some of the problems that I think exist with this setup.

1. The Clique mod is being used for only two abilities. I think I can intelligently ramp up this number and tie in some keys that can get em out of a pickle in the heat of battle.
2. The Ctrl key is hard to reach, and only programmed into one of the “survival” groupings. I think I should get rid of this.
3. The ‘Z’, ‘Shift’, ‘F’ and ’8′ – ‘=’ keys are not being used. Thought it must be said that aside from ‘F’ most of these are hard to reach, given my set-up.
4. The keys ‘F1′ – ‘F3′ are not being used. But I don’t know what to put in there.
5. There are too many buttons. This may be really screwing me up in the grand scheme of things.
6. Since I use the mouse buttons very extensively, I think I should get a Naga-esque mouse with more than just two extra buttons to play with.

Any suggestions for improvement?

Gold then.

A while back I put up a post titled: ‘“I Miss 40-man Raids” or “Vanilla Nostalgia”‘. Turns out that isn’t the only thing I miss about the vanilla days.

One of the systems that has gone through a radical transformation over the last seven years of WoW has been gold acquisition. I remember when gold was a highly sought after commodity. Having 100 gold in your inventory at 60 was a big deal. When buying a Krol Blade meant you had to save up some cash for a long, long time. I remember when the highest price on the AH would be three figures. Putting up something for 1K gold would get you ridiculed general and trade chats.

Daily Quests: Then

Um, we didn’t have any.

Daily Quests: Now

One of the ways to acquire gold these days (if you are not an enterprising Auction House player like myself), is to simply do the allotted 25 daily quests daily. If you got an average of 17 gold per quest, you would end up getting 2975 gold in a single week from just quest turn-ins, never mind the items you would pick up for vendoring or auctioning. I think that is a tad ridiculous now. Making nearly 3K guaranteed gold in vanilla would make me one of the richest players on any server. These days, thanks to inflation, this is the “norm”.

Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder: Then

A vanilla player would gawk at you stupidly. This was not even fathomable then. Hell even PvP was with players of the same server, and queues could be up to an hour long for AV.

Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder: Now

The sheer volume of gold you can make from DF and LFR is technically infinite. LFR will net you about 170 gold every week, so that is negligible. But you could technically keep queuing in DF all week, making 25G every run, in addition to whatever items you pick up for the AH or for selling to vendors, not to mention loot for your characters, disenchanted crystals and gold made from unfinished quests.

Gold for Experience: Then

If you hit the level cap of 60 in vanilla, any quests you finished past that point would result in getting you squat in addition to the quest rewards (be it currency or gear).

Gold for Experience: Now

Now, after you hit the level cap, the experience you would normally gain from turning in a quest gets converted instead to gold. I leveled my hunter in Cataclysm from 81-85 via Mount Hyjal, Deepholm, and a little bit of Twilight Highlands. After hitting 85, all the quests I finished in Uldum, the rest of Twilight Highlands, and Vash’ir nets me gold for experience. This concept was unheard of in vanilla WoW.

Gold now.

I hit level 85 in Cataclysm less than two months ago (I think), and I have over 50K gold, and that is with minimal effort and time invested. The point of this post, as was the case with the last one, is not to berate the WoW of today. The game has gone through an evolutionary process over the last seven years and a lot of changes are for the better. I just remember the good old days when being able to make copious amounts of gold was a skill and not a god-given right!

What do you think? Do you feel all this convenience is a good thing for MMO evolution, or has gold-acquisition been made too easy?

Slightly imbalanced!

Empire < Republic.

I don’t know what it is about the Dark Side of the Force, but clearly it is very alluring to human beings. With the Empire outnumbering the Republic forces by a considerable volume, it was only a matter of time before the imbalance in the PvP blew up in the Republic collective, melting faces. My question is this, did no one really see this coming?

Now I love BioWare. Aside from the mediocre Dragon Age II, I don’t think they have released a game in recent memory that has entertained me beyond expectations. What boggles me is how is it possible that so much time, effort, energy, money and resources were poured into a top of the line AAA MMO, and the multiplayer aspect of it is broken? Take Tol Barad for example. It is an open PvP zone most of the time, and anyone can come and go as they please, except for when every 2-3 hours there is a power struggle with both factions vying for control of the zone for the next 2-3 hours. The horrid mechanics of Tol Barad notwithstanding, what is great about this zone is that the system throws everyone out at the start of the fight, and brings in an equal number of players to face off. If 10 horde queue and 20 alliance queue, only 10 from each side will get in to ensure the fight is balanced.

Despite sinking millions of dollars into SWTOR, and, as my friend Matthew would claim, “revamping and or polishing the best WoW has to offer”, somehow they missed this little possibility. The forums are now ablaze with players up in arms about the whole fiasco, some even saying they are thankful for it, because now they can quit before the payment cycle kicks in after the first free month. Ouch. Offering incentives for players to come slaughter one another in world PvP is a great idea, if BioWare can ensure that the an equivalent number of players from either faction will engage in battle. Given that BioWare already had data indicating higher numbers in one faction, this should never have happened in the first place.

I have always been partial to being an early adopter. The initial feedback about SWTOR is positive, not overwhelmingly so, but the kind that piques your curiosity the more opinions you peruse. However, it is BioWare’s solution to this and similar future debacles that will determine if I ever invest in the title. And yes, I too will be joining the Empire!

The Pandaren monks must be meditating for a long time because it seems that they will be the next major content patch in WoW. That’s right kids, 4.3 is the end of the line as far as Cataclysm related content goes. I initially thought they might do something like “Sunwell for Cataclysm” to hold on to their player-base, considering especially that they have lost nearly two million subscribers in the last year. But no, good old Blizzard is sticking to their guns and maintaining Deathwing as the final major encounter in Cataclysm.

This effectively implies a few things for me as a player, roughly divided into two broad categories.

Category A: Quit until Mists of Pandaria

Fairly self-explanatory.

Category B: Prepare for the Expansion, Fluff and PvP

In this category I will certainly not be raiding. I have tried LFR, and the guild does weekly runs with 7/8 of Dragon Soul on farm status. But for me, that is just insufficient. I see little point in my character acquiring the top-tier gear when it will go obsolete next patch when a whole new ball-game begins. Instead, I’d rather focus on the things I have been meaning to wrap up. These include, in no particular order:

• A proper secondary and tertiary alt
• Level Archeology to the cap and go after some of the rares in that profession
• Level my second profession, Blacksmithing.
• Transfer the mining profession by leveling it through smelting on my secondary character, and pick up Engineering on my main.
• Expand my companion list. I have 46 so far, with little effort. I wonder how well prepared can I be for Pokemon with any actual effort.
• Do some of the fun little fluff achievements.
• Loremaster (*shudder*)
• Go after some of the rarer mounts, or mounts that take a great deal of effort and/or time
• PvP my heart out, especially with the guild

At this point I am not sure. Any suggestions?

And no I don’t seem myself switching to another MMO, free or otherwise. Unless they announced when The Secret World was coming out.

An accurate portrayal of the last thing my desktop ever saw...

So an electric storm fried my PC. The laptop and the Xbox are still intact, and I am grateful. But this also means that 120 hours of work in Skyrim has effectively effervesced onto whatever the digital equivalent of heaven is.

I came up with a creative solution for backing up my save game data though. All games that I have at this point, I am redirecting their folders as shortcuts in my Dropbox (check it out if you don’t know what it is, its amazing!) This way even if one PC fries, the files are synced across all computers that I have Dropbox installed on, and on their website!

Unless anyone else has any clever ideas…

Also wanted to share this little gem of a conversation I had with someone in trade chat recently:

It happened with Gears of War 3. It recently happened with Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

In of itself, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is a great game. It certainly plays a lot better if you have the previous games at the back of your mind, the mechanics are easier to pick up, the button combinations are familiar and the complex story continues from where it left off. However, even if you never played another Assassin’s Creed game, Revelations is a fantastic title. It is well-designed, the graphics are top-notch, and iterations of the same formula implies that Ubisoft has improved the game over the last five odd years into a smooth, entertaining, unforgettable experience.

What irks me though, is that nearly every review of the game incessantly compares it to previous titles in the series, and complains about how there has been “too little improved”. The same reviews give the title fairly high scores and say how well it plays, but at the same time complain about how familiar it feels. What is wrong with feeling familiar I ask? Why is it that we as gamers, and critics alike, cannot see a game on its own merits, irrespective of previous iterations. Sure it must be difficult at times, especially if it is a continuous story arc (like Creed or Gears) as opposed to separate stories (like GTA), but if a game is good, why does it matter what its predecessor did or didn’t do right?

I don’t think that practice is fair. I don’t think tinting the review because of a previous title gives us an accurate idea of the merits of the title under review in an unbiased fashion. And I think we should collectively stop doing that. So say we all!

Having never played Horde-side (except for the very shiny new mage), I never really knew that Eitrigg was actually a fairly important character for the Orcs. It got me to thinking: “what do the names of the servers I play on mean in the larger lore context of the game?” Here is what I came up with.

Bloodhoof

This one was easy. The Bloodhoofs are one of the noble families of the Tauren Race. The two most significant characters are Craine Bloodhoof, the late High Chieftain of the Taurens, and Baine Bloodhoof. Cairne dueled Garrosh Hellscream but was betrayed by Magatha who secretly poisoned Hellscream’s weapon. The chieftain dying words were:

“And so, I, who have lived my whole life with honor, die betrayed”.

Baine Bloodhoof is Cairne’s son, and the new High Chieftain of the race.

Bloodhoof is also a village in the Mulgore zone.

Eitrigg

Eitrigg is an aging warrior of the Orc clan who fought in both the First and Second Wars and lost two sons in the process.

He sequestered himself to seclusion, but was stumbled upon by Tirion Fordling. The two fought, and the duel ended with Eitrigg rescuing an unconscious Tirion from a collapsing tower. Tirion is forever in Eitrigg’s debt and hold him in high regard.

In Wrath of the lich King, Tirion wrote to High Warchief Thrall, leader of the Orcs and the Horde in general, asking after Eitrigg and requesting that he be sent to Northrend as Tirion “needed a good Orc by his side.”

Eitrigg was one of the the three advisers Thrall recommended to Garrosh Hellscream as he ascended to the Horde leadership. the other two were Vol’jin of the Trolls and Cairne of the Taurens.

Maelstrom

Aside from being the most significant plot-location in Cataclysm, The Maelstrom was originally formed during the Great Sundering, some 10,000 odd years before the events of World of Warcraft (vanilla). Before that, it used to be the Well of Eternity. Here is an excerpt from the Warcraft III manual:

As the aftershocks from the Well of Eternity’s implosion rattled the bones of the world, the seas rushed in to fill the gaping wound left in the earth. Nearly eighty percent of Kalimdor’s landmass had been blasted apart, leaving only a handful of separate continents surrounding the new, raging sea. At the center of the new sea, where the Well of Eternity once stood, was a tumultuous storm of tidal fury and chaotic energies. This terrible scar, known as the Maelstrom, would never cease its furious spinning. It would remain a constant reminder of the terrible catastrophe… and the Utopian era that had been lost forever.

It is implied that the Maelstrom is slowly drawing the Broken Isles towards itself, and will ultimately destroy them for good.

Agamaggan

This one was a little difficult to find. Agamaggan a Giant Boar, one of the many ancients roaming Azeroth in it’s early days. During the War of the Ancients, Cenarius sought the assistance of Agamaggan against the Burning Legion. Agamaggan fought Mannoroth, eventually falling in battle, but his sacrifice was vital for Malfurion and his allies to enter the stronghold of Azshara and reach the Well of Eternity. Some of these events can be witnessed in the new 5-man dungeon,Well of Eternity.

What do the names of the servers you play on mean?

These are the same three games I mentioned in a post not long ago!

For those of you who played WoW from the very early days, do you remember when:

• Attuning for Onyxia meant weeks of farming UBRS with 20 people
• Clearing to Lucifron took a half hour and a wipe or two
• We used to raid with 40 people
• Paladins were Alliance-only, and Shamans were Horde-only
• Since each boss dropped only two tokens, that meant a 40-man raid would get geared from MC (assuming nothing every got DE’ed), at least 20 weeks, or five months
• Vendorstrike was the longest running joke since you could take out Sulfuron Harbinger

What these factors have in common was that the end-game was designed to be conquered by only the most hardcore of players. It took time, and skill, and effort and energy to coordinate a team of 40 people, and some how avoid any idiocy. Raiding, gearing, attuning took time, effort, energy and patience.There were no 25-mans, no 20-mans, no 10-mans. A raid was 40 people, period.

First the 40-mans were reduced to 25-mans. Then 10-mans were added, but the coordination required for 25-mans was rewarded by putting in gear of a slightly lower ilvl in 10-mans. Then they were balanced out as well, and heroic modes were added. And finally we have LFR. Today you can log in, queue for LFR, and be raiding with the now-largest raid size (25), in a matter of seconds. There is no skill requirement (unless you equate ilvl with skill), there is no filtering mechanism for determining if an individual knows what to do in a fight. The bosses hit like pussies, the loot drops like rain, and WoW’s much-elusive end-game is officially accessible to any and all M&S. Hell, bots could get better results.

My point is that WoW is no longer just accessible. It is now handicap accessible. People that have no propensity for raiding, who actually don’t mind AFK’ing through most of LFR and then rolling need on everything that drops are flourishing, their lives made easier. The world’s largest MMO has all the mechanisms in place to allow an individual to play the game as anti-socially as humanly possible. Skill is no longer a requirement. Decency is no longer a requirement. All you need is a level 85, and a heartbeat.

If this post is too negative, I apologize. I don’t mean to be. But if you join an LFR raid, score consistently in the top three for DPS with your crappy gear, and your group wipes time and again on Ultraxion trash, it tends to strike a nerve.

Image courtesy of The Death Knight Diaries.

(Sidenote: if you are on the EU servers, pop in Aggamagan server, Alliance side. I play on a Night Elf Hunter called “Jehangir”.)

The Holy Trinity of Modern Shooters

I haven’t played a shooter in nearly two months. I finished Modern Warfare 3 the day it came out, not because it was oh-so-good (it wasn’t), but because there was a story that has been in the making since 2007, and I wanted to see it to whatever (largely bitter) end. I also played Battlefield 3, which was shockingly similar in premise, up to and including playable Russian operatives, but moderately more enjoyable and equally unlikely. Gears of War 3 is sitting somewhere around my Xbox, ready to be played, but I think at this stage, I am just tired of shooters.

It seems to be that shooters these days rely primarily on the three factors:

An on-rails experience: Everything these days seems to center around playing the role of the developer’s puppet, a well-trained mouse making it’s way down an elaborate maze while an invisible hand guides it and ridiculously over-the-top set-pieces fuel it.

Over the top action sequences: You can survive bullets to the face, you can outrun a nuclear explosion, you can survive at least three separate helicopter crashes, you can jump from the tallest buildings without breaking bones. And while we are at it, why is it that 90% of the time, the chopper that was supposed to rescue you, crashes right before, during, or immediatly after the rescue attempt?

Shock value: This is perhaps the most critical of these elements. Every major shooter suffers from the need to create the biggest shock value, a controversial scene that will create airwaves, and fuel the next the right-wing anti-video-game-pundits tirade of why video games lead to artificial insemination or explosive diarrhea while simultaneously burning holes through our social and moral fabric.

Do AAA Developers Care About Critical Success or Commercial Success?

At this stage, I am just tired of the endless clones that result from the unholy amalgamation of the afore-mentioned three factors. Oddly enough, the best games of 2011, Portal 2, Bastion, Skyrim, did not need to resort to these elements in order to be critically successful. So perhaps all these developers care about at this stage is commercial success. Critical success and audience satisfaction be damned.

I am not trying to say that this is the only motivation. I am sure as a labor of love, most developers feel they are creating something of value that will be remembered for some time to come. The latest trailer for Rainbow Six: Patriots is a stark reminder of this. There is a scene where a civilian is instructed by a terrorist cell to go to Times Square to detonate the vest or his wife will be killed. Team Rainbow intercepts this man, realizes there is no time to diffuse the bomb, makes the split/second decision to chose the life of one over the lives of many, and throws him off of a bridge with seconds to spare. The bomb detonates before the poor bastard hits the water.

The developer jargon accompanying the trailer says the game will confront the player with similar tough choices, which begs the question: do they understand what ‘choice’ means? Choice implies that I have two or more ways of resolving a situation, and each of these paths has it’s own set of advantages and disadvantages. If one choice ends in one man dying, and the other includes him and everyone around you (including you) dying, is it really a choice? My point is that the entire thing is created for pure shock value, and the illusion of choice is stapled to it to give it illusion of meaning.

An article I read recently by a gentleman called David Burroughs on Sabotage Times called into question the need for such shock value, how it has diminishing returns and how it ultimately doesn’t add anything of value.

Is it right to expect the player to abstain from ‘murdering’ the ‘people’ in the airport when the only means of communication awarded the player is engage with the game and shoot, or do nothing?

Can something as intentionally controversial as ‘No Russian’ carry any real weight when the entire narrative is experienced down the barrel of a gun?

This is a very subtle but significant point. The whole point of the No Russian mission was to paint a picture of the atrocities of war, and how it would affect us if the horrors visited upon people in warzones were inflicted upon the ‘civilized’ world in a single act of mindless madness. But how can something like that carry any weight when the narrative involves you committing the atrocity. The whole point of identifying with the victims is to be able to paint on a face for the antagonist, but when you are the perpetrator yourself (or at the very least a silent observer) how do you create the impact? Ostensibly, the whole idea then, is to create controversy, an act filled with such a horrendous premise that developers know it will attract the ire of critics almost universally. And perhaps they welcome it. For no publicity is bad publicity, right? Except this strategy has exponentially diminishing returns.

Ever wonder why a small child getting blown up, while on vacation in Europe, in Modern Warfare 3 didn’t create nearly as much hype?

News story from Massively.com today: Multiverse shuts down: Firefly, Buffy MMOs officially dead. Call me ill-informed, but I didn’t even know those existed! I would have at least liked to take a look at the Firefly one!

"I'm too sexy for this shit!"

I am an odd gamer. Or at least I like to think that I am. I play a lot of video games, across just about ever genre. The only exception is fighting games and racing games (although Split/Second came a long way to change that). But unlike a rational human being who stops playing a game because of a certain reason, such as increasingly lack of interest, boring story, shoddy mechanics, or simply that something better came out, I have to finish a game I have started. It is a weird obsession.

All other factors notwithstanding, three things drive me in a game:

1. The story
2. The amount of fun I am having
3. The fact that I can cross it off of my list when I finish it

Most of the time, a combination of 1 & 2 in varying degrees of success suffice, with 3 being the constant. However, a recent game has kind of ruined this simple three-point agenda for me.

Decimating Dragons (isn’t heroic)

I played The Elder Scrolls for 72 hours in less than two weeks. I couldn’t get enough of it. At the end of the 72 hours, I had barely touched the main quests, reached level 50, brought the thieves back into power in Riften and discovered dozens of random locations as murdered my way through the land. It took a well placed single shot from my legendary Daedra bow to bring an Elder Dragon crashing down to earth, and for me to realize that I was far more powerful than the game intended for me to be at this stage. And that, you see, is a serious problem.

Now don’t get me wrong, I want to finish Skyrim. I love the story, the setting, the graphics. I have installed close to 20 mods to tweak the look of the game to be as gorgeous as my monster of a machine can make it, and even in my over-powered state, I am enjoying the game. In essence, 1, 2 and 3 are all satisfied, but somehow I know this isn’t the way to play Skyrim. I am also dreadfully aware that having an overpowered character is why I stopped playing Fallout 3.

"Come to papa!"

I know that when I come across that Ancient Dragon, it is supposed to be a tough fight, like the second dragon I randomly encountered in the world. I know I am not supposed to clear out a high-level dungeon without a companion by simply sneaking and single-shotting everything from the shadows. At this stage in the game, I can lay waste to entire armies without ever breaking a sweat. I am the Wrath of Odin incarnate. I am Fire, Frost and Shadow personified. I am Alpha and Omega.

And I know there is no challenge left. And this, oddly, adds a fourth dimension to the game that I was not aware of: balance. In order to be the hero, you must be able to perform heroic feats in the world. Tearing a dragon asunder with a single Elven Arrow isn’t exactly very heroic, in fact, as it turns out, it is incredibly lame. I haven’t played Skyrim in five weeks now. I want to play it. There are so many quests in my log. There are so many locations I haven’t visited. There are so many people I haven’t helped. But I am just constantly put of by the fact that when I do get back in, all of it will be so incredibly easy, it wouldn’t make for a meaningful experience. Ever get to this stage?

Images courtesy of Dead End Thrills.

I stopped blogging for two months. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I was increasingly aware of a pattern in my posts that I was just not comfortable with. Let’s see if you can agree with it:

1. Most of the posts were too negative. I found myself bitching about a lot of things that really weren’t that bad to begin with. Constructive criticism and always questioning are good traits, sure, but I felt like I had taken it a little too far.
2. More importantly, I realized that I was no longer blogging about the games that I was playing, but that I was playing games that I was blogging about. This is a critical point for me. Somewhere along the way, I stopped playing what I enjoy, and started playing what “everyone else was playing” just to be a part of the conversation. I feel that somewhere in all this, Are We New At This lost its identity.

So after months of deliberation, I realized this blog isn’t about how many hits it gets, or who reads it, or whether I am discussing the most “in” topic. This blog is about me, and my adventures in the wonderful, magical world of video games. And that is all it will be from now on.

First post with this mindset tomorrow, stay tuned.

Also, I have a preview for the game up at Hooked Gamers, pieced together with everything I could find on the tile around the interwebz. Take a look!

Inspired by Klepsacovic, I just realized something.

Q: What do Adam Jensen of Deus Ex: Human Revolutions and Rogues from World of Warcraft have in common?

A: They are both sneaky.

They stick to shadows.

They use hit and run tactics.

They put out an incredible amount of damage in short bursts.

And they both get stuck with boss fights where the only way to fight is out in the open, and none of their penchant for sneaky antics gets leveraged in any way!

1. Superb Stability

My copy of Rage has had zero issues on my PC. It ran the first time I launched it, it never stuttered, never showed any graphical glitches or screen-tearing, it never crashed. It works like a charm. I know “this game installs and runs” shouldn’t technically be a reason for loving the title, but given the sheer amount of rage over Rage (I had to – sue me) in the Steam forums, I am very grateful for the utter lack of technical difficulties with the title.

2. Breathtakingly Beautiful

Carmack has done it again. The game world is absolutely, incredibly, undeniably gorgeous. From the smallest rocks to the largest cliffs, and from the tiniest settlements to the massive towns, Rage is a beautiful, gorgeous game. Stepping out of the Ark for the first time, I spent the first five minutes just spinning the camera around, looking at the beauty of the world that surrounded me. The shafts of lights from a sun, half-obscured by billowing photo-realistic clouds, water that shimmered and rippled and textures that jumped at you with the sheer amount of detail contained within.

3. Destructive Driving featuring Various Vehicles

Unlike other games that make you work for it, Rage gives you a vehicle pretty much from the very beginning. You can continue to get newer, better, more specialized vehicles, as the game goes on, but you can drive at the very start. You don’t get a shoddy starter vehicle either, this little quad can book it, and it can get you where you need to go because there are significant travel distances between points of interest on the map.

And then there are the races. There are a variety of tracks where you can race your various vehicles in modes ranging from simple racing, to an all-out war zone with machine guns, rocket launchers and road spikes. The racing mythology is well-embedded into the gaming world, and winning several races gets you some recognition with NPCs randomly stopping to admire your success and praise your driving skills. Yet the driving part of Rage feels a little disjointed, as if it was a separate game that was incorporated into the larger game world, and the developer was clever enough to hide the areas where the overlap was soldered together.

4. Walloping Weapons

The weapons in Rage, all the way from the starting Settler Pistol, are meaty and pack a wallop. These are id Software weapons. They are highly detailed, they feel solid and chunky in your hands, and they shoot some serious ordnance. If the several weapons were not enough, each weapon also fires several types of ammunition, like the Fatboys that double the standard round damage for a pistol, or the Fat Mammas, which proclaim that if these don’t kill your target, you better hightail it out of there! Every weapon in rage feels just right. They have an authoritative presence, and it’s satisfying to see them do their dirty work. Add grenades and the much-touted (and rightly so) Wingstick, and you are a one-man mutant-slaughtering bandit-bashing army.

5. Ostensibly Sensible Objectives

Did you ever have to gather 100 pigeons in Grand Theft Auto? What about 100 feathers in Assassin’s Creed? Better yet, have you tried the World of Warcraft achievements? There are several collectible items and objectives peppered through the game world of Rage. However, they aren’t as arbitrary as 100 of who-gives-a-shit. One is 3 field goals. There are field goals, and you have to drive your vehicle hard enough into something to fling yourself from it far enough to fly through said field goal. It sounds like a fluff objective, and it is, but it is fun, and there are only three of them. There are also 18 jumps in the game. Not 100. not 54. Just 18, and hitting each jump doesn’t simply add a +1 counter to your number of jumps, it rewards you with items for each individual jump, if successfully completed.

But perhaps the best of these collectibles are the Rage Collectible cards. Within enemy stronghold, settlements and the open game world, there are a total of 54 game cards for you to find. These aren’t just tokens, but effectively a tabletop game, where your cards have health and damage numbers, and you try to beat opponents to cash out a hefty chunk of change.

This is the kind of obsessive compulsive game completion objective that I can get behind. Objectives that are fun to achieve, and give rewards if you complete, instead of a flat percentage towards your percentage completed score.

6. Characters

The characters in Rage are well fleshed out. The animations look life-like and the voice-acting is absolutely top-notch. Largely, they still suffer from the MMO-esque NPC syndrome: they are only there to dispense missions and collect rewards, but somehow it still works. People can be seen walking about towns, bandits freely roam the desert in deadly vehicles, and there is a natural buzz to life, despite ultimately plastic characterization of their humanity.

7. Raging Rollercoaster

Rage isn’t a sand box by any stretch of the imagination. Sure the game world is huge, and once you get a set of missions, you can choose to complete them in whichever order you see fit, but at the end of the day, the entire game is a linear experience of getting from point A to point Z, hitting B, C, D etc. on the way. And as much as I love open worlds, this is actually a beautifully thing. Rage is a tightly controlled experience. Intense firefights in claustrophobic close quarters, vicious dune buggy races across torn tarmacs, linear gameplay in a (largely) linear world. Rage is the ultimate roller-coaster. Once you get on, you don’t want to get off.

Ignorantly Insignificant

I can’t give away the ending, obviously. Nor can i divulge details on what your ultimate objective is. But I will say this: there will come a point when you will realize you are not the hero of this story. You are simply a small cog in a much larger machine, and you are to do your part the best way you can. This is ultimately what really set Rage apart for me, the realization that no matter how powerful I got or how many enemies I can kill by simply flexing my biceps, I am ultimately insignificant, a mere speck in the unending evolution (and devolution) of the human condition.

We have no qualms against torturing, assassinating, stealing or even committing genocide if our superiors structure it as a “quest objective.”  We have no options for diplomacy and no recourse but to end all life in our wake.  We do all of this and move on without a second thought as to the carnage and emotional wreckage we leave behind.  We build our success on mountains of corpses and call ourselves “heroes.”

Syp, The blood of the innocent drips from my hands, Bio Break

Oh my god. I am a horrible, horrible person! Talk about mid-life MMO existential crisis!

You know that moment, when you get up from your PC, and cheer out loud, because you accomplished something so insanely unachievable, you can’t believe you did it yourself? That is what happened to me in my first Dominion match in League of Legends.

I was playing with a friend. This friend was in the same room as me, sitting to my left. A third guy, someone we had randomly met online was also in the game. The last two spots on our team were filled by pugs.

The match started, and we started rotating through the various nodes. The three of us managed to hold on to two nodes and kept methodically pushing a third, the other two players milled about in the middle and occasionally assaulted their nodes closer to their nexus. The enemy was able to dedicate four champions against our three, and of the two nodes, we occasionally lost one, and fell back long enough to capture another node, bringing us back to the status quo of 2 nodes. We were effectively bleeding points throughout the game. By the end, their nexus had 350 points left, ours had only 1.

We were losing, badly.

And then something magical happened. Through no coordinated effort of our team, we managed to neutralize two nodes and capture three. For the next six or so minutes, we fought for our lives as we pushed against the enemy, interrupting node channeling and keeping them from capturing even a single node. They came close several times, beleaguered and disrupted, desperately trying to get that one final point that would bring them victory. But somehow, through sheer willpower and an unprecedented amount of effort, our team managed to keep them at bay.

The match ended with 0:1, in our favor. They lost all 350+ points against our final point. We shoved our chairs back, threw our fists in the air and cheered. It was one of the greatest moments I have ever had in online gaming.

And that, my friends, is why we play.

Deus Ex: Human Choices

I just finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution after my second time through. My save files were corrupted right after I completed everything in Hengsha the second time around (about 80% of the game completed). As much as that had sucked, that actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it turns out I had made some fairly silly augmentation choices.

Loved:

• The various augmentations. Despite there being some really foolish augmentation choices, the overall system was well-thought out and true to the Deus Ex experience.
• The stealth aspect was superb. I learned to take out entire groups of enemies using just single takedowns and the cover system (no double take-downs, no noise reduction, no forced distractions, no invisibility). You can upgrade your abilities to further augment the stealth play-style, eventually turning into an invisible killing machine. But I loved the fact that you could use stealth to your advantage from the very beginning.
• The game offered multiple paths to reach your objective. I think it is a little misleading to say the game offers multiple options to complete an objective, because at the end of the day, you just need to get from point A to point B. The game does offer multiple paths to get there though. You can run and gun. You can use lethal takedowns and stick to the shadows. You can use non-lethal takedowns to pursue the path of being a pacifist. You can bypass most enemies en route to your objective.
• The moral dilemma upon landing in Hengsha the second time. I had played as a pacifist the entire game, and I had to choose to remain a pacifist or to save a character’s life. I ended up choosing the later. It is moments like these that make great video games, when you are forced to make genuinely tough decisions, where the  option you choose isn’t the easiest or the most moral of the presented outcomes.

Did not Love:

• The damn boss fights. They sucked. They didn’t offer “choice” in how to handle the boss. Each boss fight was “pump boss full of lead till it keels over”. As a stealth player, I was sorely disappointed.
• The story, though well-written, can be summarized in about seven sentences.
• Stealth gameplay adds artificial length to the game. If you shoot your way through and don’t engage in side-quests, I don’t think the main story would take you more than 5-6 hours. Which is a little lame.
• The choice at the end was to literally press one of four buttons to see a different ending. I felt cheated at the end. I felt like the game had engaged me to make all of these decisions during my adventures, and none of those decisions eventually mattered because in the end I could simply flick the switch for whichever ending I chose, regardless of the logistical or moral choices I had made up to that point. I didn’t like that one bit.

Overall it is a great game, and one I would recommend for any RPG/Stealth lover. It has it’s flaws, but they can be (largely) overlooked. Give it a try if you haven’t yet.

Online Gaming Overload

WoW Leveling

I had slight MMO overload over the last few days. I played WoW almost compulsively, because it was so easy to invest just another half hour into it and get another level for your character. I had a small episode of a burnout, so I decided to purposely stay away for a few days. It worked. It has been three days and I am itching to play it again.

Superhero Simulators

I have been dabbling a little into Champions Online. I am level 11 now, but the I am not quite happy with the Archetype I picked. I also read that this was probably the most balanced of the offered Archetypes, so if this is the best they have to offer without paying, then maybe I ought to focus my attention on City of Heroes, which has recently transitioned into an F2P model as well.

Global Agenda

Good game to start off in, the tutorial levels are very well laid out, and I had a lot of fun with the smaller skirmishes. But I have my hands rather full these days and something’s got to give. That something has turned out to be Global Agenda. Not that it matters, because where I dropped Global Agenda, I picked up…

…League of Legends

God damn whoever made this game because it is addictive as hell. I have only played two games so far, but my DOTA flashbacks have effectively ensured I will be screwing around in this title for a while. I am going to try out all the free to play characters for now, just to get a better handle on the game, and I am not touching Dominion yet, simply because I must wrap my head around the basics first. I will also continue to research the paid characters and see which one best suits my play-style. All in all, good game, and I am glad (wroth) that I got coerced into giving it a try. Because now I am hooked. Damn it.

StarCraft II

I am steadily getting better as a Protoss player. I have made it a rule to get at least four to five 1v1 matches in a week so my macro game continues to improve. But my true love in StarCraft II right now is playing with a friend in ranked 2v2. It is a treat to play and I am very happy with everything it has to offer so far.