T w e n t y S i d e d

Am I the only one who thinks this is interesting? Maybe not the most hilarious thing I’ve ever written, but it still amuses me.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

My article this week is a bit about grinding in RPG’s.

When I played World of WoWcraft two years ago, I got fed up and quit as the mid-30’s slump kicked in. The same thing happened again at about the same level in LOTRO. But now I’m back to WoW and right now Shadowless is about 2 dead spiders away from level 42.

Part of my success is attributable to the changes to the leveling that sped up things in the mid game. Part of it is that the game is a little more polished and fun. Part of it is that I knew the slump was coming, so I didn’t get discouraged when progress slowed. Part of it is that this time around I knew where to go for level-appropriate quests.

By nature, I WANT to stay in one area until I’ve exhausted all of the quests. But you usually can’t do that. The quests will go up in level faster than you do, and you’ll eventually be in over your head. This even applies in the early game. If you do all the quests around Goldshire in the human area, you’ll be two or three levels short of being able to enter Westfall. I don’t think you should have to travel to some other area of the world or level grind that early in the game. (Or ever, but especially then.)

It’s often better to do the 30-35 content in one zone, then hop to another zone and do the 30-35 content, then another, then head back to the first zone and take on the 35-40 content. I dislike this, as there are a few quest lines in these zones that tell a little story. They’re not Shakespeare or anything, but they’re sometimes amusing and often give a new look at the setting. But the zone-hopping breaks them all up. You’ll turn in step 2 of a quest chain and find that step 3 is suddenly five levels above you. (This problem is really bad in Stranglethorn Vale. I’ve been to that zone three times, and I still have a bunch of unfinished quests there.) Maybe next weekend you’ll be back, but by that time you’ll have forgotten what was doing which thing to what dudes because of huh? Ah, screw it. Just hit “accept quest” and let quest helper aim me at my goal. I don’t have time to look this up on the wiki and figure out what was going on.

Still, I have to keep reminding myself that WoW is six years old. I’m sure this system was viewed as very friendly and gentle compared to then-leader Everquest. I’ll bet a lot of this will be smoothed over in the upcoming Cataclysm global revamp. (Which is funny. Hey! The world is beset by disaster and now everything works better!)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

A comic about one of the big set-piece encounters in the game, the part where you pull down a Star Destroyer.

I actually hated this part of the game. The controller cues were very misleading, and I ended up looking online to see what I was doing wrong. At the bottom of the screen is an icon of a couple of analog sticks, indicating which way you should be moving the sticks you have under your thumbs. Except, they didn’t do a very good job.

The right stick just indicates “up” or “down”, but there’s a certain inertia to what you’re doing. You’ll hold down the controller for several seconds with no real idea of what this is supposed to be doing. (You’re leveling out the Star destroyer. Because… Uh. Actually, why the crap does the thing need to be level if I’m just yanking it out of the air? Which is part of the problem. This isn’t something I expected I’d need to do and so I was just following the on-screen prompts with no idea of what I was supposedly accomplishing.) But if you just hold the stick you’ll overshoot the correct orientation and then have to push the stick the other way. You actually need to “nudge” the stick as the ship gets close to level. If you just follow the prompts you’ll never get it into place.

While you’re pondering all of that, you also need to be worrying about the left stick. (And unlike the other stick, you don’t really need to nudge it.) But because of the way the icon looked I couldn’t tell if it was telling me to hold up-left, or if it just wanted direct left. It could be saying either way depending on if you believe this to be a perspective view of the stick or a direct overhead view. (Answer: Perspective. Just hold the stick left.)

And while you’re trying to do all of this, TIE fighters are coming. Just about the time you’ve got the thing maybe figured out, you have to stop and fight a bunch of TIE fighters. By the time you’ve dispatched them, the Star Destroyer is again crooked. (Again, why do I care how it’s aligned? I’m just pulling it down! And the cutscene shows it crashing nose-first despite all this leveling out nonsense.)

Anyway, eventually you’ll get the ship into position and you’ll be prompted to pull down on both sticks. But the way the icons showed the sticks constantly moving down, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to hold them down or if I was supposed to move them forward and backward repeatedly.

And even if you do this all correctly and understand everything the icons are telling you, you’ll still need to go through the process three times and fight three waves of TIEs before you bring it down. And you don’t really get much in the way of positive feedback to let you know you’re doing it right, so when the process begins again you’ll be left wondering if you’re being punished for doing something wrong or if this is just another game designer-imposed time sink.

All of this is in addition to the fact that the game is throwing these icons up and forcing the player to stare at them instead of watching the action going on in the background.

This is the only time in the game you see these icons, and so instead of an epic event I felt like I was playing a tedious guessing game interrupted by flow-breaking TIE fighter exploding commercial breaks. I think the entire mechanic is a horrible and unsatisfying idea, but if they were going to put it in they should have trained the player in following the prompts earlier in the game. Perhaps they could have given the player a bit where they have to lift (say) their own ship out of a bog, Empire Strikes Back style. The player could fumble around and learn how it works without having waves of tie fighters strafing them while frantic NPC’s scream unhelpful things at them.

I’m sure some people got the idea the first time through, but Googling around showed that I wasn’t the only person who wondered what they were supposed to be doing. This was a fun idea marred by badly designed mechanics.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.