T w e n t y S i d e d
Sent to me by a reader. It’s a fictional TV show, but the truths herein apply directly to every roleplaying game ever.
Link (YouTube) |
Experienced Points:
It’s the End of the War as we Know it
This week’s Experienced Points is a list of all the reasons that peer-to-peer multiplayer with strangers is a terrible replacement for dedicated servers. I had to really chop this list down to make it fit, because the changes are so fundamental.
Infinity Ward has been promising that peer-to-peer gaming will be even better than gaming on a dedicated server. They even went so far as to suggest that this move would help in the fight against cheaters, while anyone who understands the nature of the problem will see that this will change the battle from “challenging” to “insurmountable”.
I listed “cheats” as my #1 concern in the article. I wrote that on Tuesday. On Wednesday – launch day – cheats had already come out. This video shows off a cheater doing his cheating business.
Link (YouTube) |
Note that this is even worse than I predicted. This is a client-side cheater. Still worse, is that according to people that have the game you can’t even kick the cheaters.
Here is what I think is going on with this cheater:
It looks like his client is hacked so that it will display a red box over all foes, even ones hidden behind cover. This means the cheater can see all foes, all the time. Given his endless stream of headshots, I suspect it’s also acting as an aimbot. When he pulls the trigger, his client calculates the perfect firing solution and makes adjustments to his aim. He probably just needs to get his crosshairs inside of the red rectangle and the software does the rest.
What really makes me sad:
Day one sales of Modern Warfare 2 shattered all kinds of sales records. This makes it pretty clear to both sides just how irrelevant PC users are. The gutting of PC multiplayer and the subsequent boycott didn’t even leave a scratch.
(Hearsay from a friend who works at Gamestop: on launch day they sold over 1,000 copies of the game. Of those, only two were for the PC.)
And of course, this is also part of the problem:
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That’s the member list for the Steam group dedicated to boycotting the game. Smashing. Really. Golf clap for everyone involved. Fans. Developers. Publishers.
Stolen Pixels #142:Mario Interview Part 1
Whether you actually wanted it or not, you’re getting it: Breen vs. Mario.
Kahdzbar’s Journal: Go Play Dwarf Fortess
I was casting about for an MMO about which to do a Let’s Play. Someone suggested – perhaps jokingly, or perhaps out of a deep boiling hatred of me and my well-being – that I should do one about Dwarf Fortress.
I am trying to stick to games which can be fed into the webcomic mill and which can be recognized outside of the “obsessive masochistic genius manager” demographic, which is a little narrow for my purposes. This rules out text-based games that use ASCII art. I mean, there’s just not much percentage in trying to do a comic about a conversation between a capital U and a smiley face concerning an upside down exclamation mark that will be comprehensible to one out of every ten thousand readers.
BUT! If you’re craving to read about the gruesome and / or hilarious deaths of hapless Dwarven colonies, then Rutskarn has you covered. His first, second, and third attempts at the game met with the same rousing level of success that people have come to expect from first-plays of DF. Which I assume means he led a group of short unruly alcoholics into the deeps of the earth, where the lot of them died badly.
He’s currently doing a Let’s Play of his most recent attempt, which follows the exploits of the earnest, slightly befuddled, and probably doomed Kahdzbar. His journey begins here.
Descent: The Game That Ruined Me
Shamus, why do you use the numpad for movement in videogames? Why do you use inverted mouse controls? Why are you always banging on about bad ports all the time?
When will you people learn to stop asking questions? Now I will punish you for your earnest curiosity by answering you. In excruciating detail. Like most long boring stories concerning people of a certain age, this one begins a long time ago…
My first mouselook FPS wasn’t really Quake, it was Descent. Descent was a strange game. This was the early-ish days of gaming before the genres had been fixed in stone and developers were still running around doing crazy stuff with every new title. Like making an action 3D first-person flight simulator set indoors.
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| This is the game in its 320×200 glory. The other screenshots here were made using an updated open-source fan version that drags the thing into this century. |
You flew your ship through weightless 3D environments. This means you needed to be able to navigate and rotate in all directions. For sheer complexity of movement keys, it was surpassed only by real flight simulators and the like. At the time, this many inputs was unheard of in an action game. (Although System Shock came close.)
By default, Descent used the numpad. Like this:
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| This is just the basic movement, and leaves out cruise control, weapon-switching, etc. EDIT: After making the above image, I went back and fired up the game to find I’d gotten several details slightly wrong. Still, you get the basic idea. |
This was the first time I’d ever really used “mouselook”. I’d dabbled with it in Doom and Wolfenstein, but that was only horizontal. Since you were flying, looking down = moving mouse forward. Descent, being a “flight” game, had mouse inverted by default.
Thus began my habit of using:
- “Inverted” mouse controls.
- Numpad for movement.
When Quake came out, it felt natural to retain this keyboard layout, since it was now second nature to me. Up / Down translated seamlessly into Jump / Crouch. Roll left / right keys became lean left / right when stealth games came along. There were plenty of extra keys around the edges of the numpad for whatever special actions were required by the game.
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| The opening cutscene, which is a static picture of a corporate suit explaining the mission while your character inner-monologues about what he thinks is going on. Man, sometimes it was impressive what games were able to do with storytelling when all they had to work with was text. |
When Windows 95 rolled in, I was so grateful for my Numpad style. The WASD folks were suddenly getting blasted out of the game by that blasted key, which ended up tucked between Ctrl and Alt. (Run and crouch? Something like that.) It was bad news, and I was doing just fine on the other side of the keyboard. (Ergonomics: I slide the keyboard WAY over to the left so my hand is still in a natural position. Yes, I have a big keyboard drawer.)
The tables began to turn as we entered this decade. Games began accumulating additional inputs. WASD people had lots of keys under their hand to accommodate the new complexity, while I was forced to offload things to the inverted T arrow keys and the six-key group just under ScrLk. And I was still running out of keys.
At this point I tried migrating back over to WASD, only to find it was murderously hard to do so. Partly this is because of how much skill I’d built up. Back in 1995 I’d begun at zero: Inept. Then I learned to kick ass with the numpad. Moving over to the WASD was going to make me worse off than I was at the start. I’d be worse than inept. I’d have no skill with WASD, plus I had years of muscle memory working against me. I found myself fighting to keep my hand lined up right because the keys are staggered on the main part of the keyboard. WASD is also a different shape than Num 1, 2, 3, 8, so even when my hand was lined up I ended up over-reaching for “move forward”. It didn’t help that I was ten years older, which always slows learning down a bit.
In the end, the frustration of not having enough buttons was less than the frustration of trying to re-learn everything according to the traditions of WASD. This is about having fun, after all, not being the most elite.
But then game developers tightened the screws: Having drunk the console kool-aid, they came back to the PC with a head full of stupid and lazy:
1) Suddenly they forgot about the numpad 5. Like, you couldn’t bind that key anymore, and I was down one precious input.
2) They began treating numpad enter as identical to the main enter key. And lots of games hard-coded that one to “chat” and the like. Another key gone.
3) Suddenly the six key collection of Insert, Home, Page Up / Dn, Del, and End were all merged with numpad. You couldn’t bind numpad 9 to one thing and Page Up to another. Six keys gone!
4) The arrow keys were merged with numpad 8, 4, 6, 2. Four more keys, gone.
5) Invert mouse? Wuzat? They either omitted the feature, or implemented it in some useless, bone-headed way. (Beyond Good & Evil inverted BOTH axis, so moving mouse left would turn right. Murder.)
6) Games for Windows Live recently decided to take the Home key (both of them) for itself, forever and ever, in all cases. You can’t re-map that one. (Hey idiots: Why didn’t you take the WINDOWS KEY, since that thing is a manifest pain in the ass when running a game anyway?) One more key gone, which pushed me beneath a crucial threshold where there just weren’t enough buttons to get the job done.
Now I’m stuck here at 38 years old. I’ve been numpad-ing my way through games since 1995. Numpad gaming is obviously unsustainable. I can rant all I want against the cross-eyed dunces responsible for the above list, but the best I could possibly hope for in my wildest dreams is that things would stop getting worse.
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| The cockpit-style view. More immersive, but the window frames blocked too much of the view and I always ended up switching back to normal view. |
That one game all those years ago presented me with a perfectly reasonable setup: Use the numpad! It had enough keys, all lined up, no with Windows Key landmine, and a nice easy-to-feel edge so my hand never got lost. At the time, there was no reason not to use it. I went along for years before any problem showed up. But as a result of that one coin-toss decision, I’ve had nothing but headaches for the last five or six years. People who used WASD and the non-inverted mouse have been able to jump right into games without having to rebind everything first.
I tried again a couple of months ago to get used to WASD. It’s still so frustrating that it sucks the fun out of the game. What I think I need to do is retrace my steps. I need to go back to 1996 and work my way forward. Trying to play something complicated like an MMO or a stealth game is just too dang hard. There are too many inputs to re-learn all at once. (This drives home an important lesson about why the Wii is doing so well. Modern games have a MASSIVE learning curve, which is more or less a wall to the uninitiated. There are precious few adults with the patience and time to jump into a modern FPS and scale that sucker.) I should go back to Quake or other simplistic old-school game and re-master basic movement. I’ve got Serious Sam 2 here, which seems like a good tool for that particular job.
Once I get my skills back into the “competent” area of the spectrum, then I can give Deus Ex or Thief a try. Complex FPS games are my drug of choice, so I’ll have a nice reward waiting for me at the end of that road.
There, more than you ever wanted to know about why I take this stuff so seriously.
(Descent and Descent 2 can be procured from Good Old Games for six bucks. For both of them. There’s no school like old school. Just make sure to re-bind everything to WASD before you start.)
MMOrons
As I mentioned before, I’m shopping for a new MMO playground for when the story of Star on Chest comes to an end.
First up was Lord of the Rings Online. I finished the four-hour download, installed the thing, and got it all set up. And then I discovered that it is impossible to toggle mouse look. If you want to turn with the mouse, you must hold down the right mouse button while doing so.
Is that even possible? It can’t be. I checked the forums and found an argument from 2008 that flowed like this:
Person A: I really need mouselook. My hand is cramping from holding down the RMB.
Person B: Your hand is feeble.
Person C: Why don’t you just steer with the keyboard? You’re stupid for requesting this.
Person D: Stop saying this game is imperfect!
Look, when I play a game, my mouse governs my eyes. I expect to be able to sweep them from side to side at will. I am not a turret or a forklift, and I do not want to “steer” my eyes. Having to hold down the right mouse button ALL THE TIME in order to maintain this connection between mouse movement and what I see is a deal breaker. This is not some exotic feature, never before heard of in this history of games. This is the natural way of things. It’s how I navigated games in 1995. It’s how I navigated in Borderlands, yesterday. WoW had it. Champions Online had it. Guild Wars had it. Fallen Earth had it. Hellgate: London had it. City of Heroes had it.
This is very reason games have auto-run: Because holding down a button all the time is bad for your wrists and hands. In any event, I am not interested in overcoming a decade and a half of experience, comfort, and muscle memory in order to accommodate some bonehead’s crude, atavistic interface.
So… let’s try Age of Conan?
I go to sign up for the free trial. It says the username is taken. Wow. Do I already have a Funcom account? I do. Ah right. Now I remember: I played Anarchy Online for about twenty minutes some ages ago, and the two games share a common database. Cool. That saves me the hassle of creating an account.
Only… it doesn’t give me the option for the free trial. Apparently this is only for completely new users, and if you’ve played Anarchy Online then you can’t have a free trial of Age of Conan? Ubuhwhat?
Fine. I’m thinking of just buying the game outright. It’s only $20. Even if it doesn’t work for a Let’s Play, I might be able to wring a comic or two out of the thing. But before I click the thing I see the fine print:
In order to activate a new game on an existing account, you must verify your contact information.
Hmm. Busywork. Fine. You want to confirm my e-mail or…
In order to verify your account, you must have an SMS enabled phone and be able to-
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? You guys want my PHONE NUMBER?!?
No. No no. Nononono. My phone number is a treasure I guard carefully. For the last ten years I have had an unlisted landline number, but I trusted too many companies with that sequence of digits and now the thing rings twice daily with spam calls. I keep the landline for business reasons, but my personal private non-public secret mobile phone number is simply not on the table.
I’m asking if I can have one of your free samples at the deli, and you’re telling me we gotta have rough unprotected sex first.
Why do you need my phone? Why not ask for a credit card? (If you want to confirm adulthood.) Or just my email? (To confirm my contact info.)
The other option is to run to the store and buy a boxed copy. I’m sure big-box stores won’t have it, and I’m sure Gamestop will be selling it for launch-day prices.
But.. the other, other option is to just create a brand-new account. Which works perfectly and without asking for money or attempting to invade my privacy. It takes about two minutes, and I’m in business. I occurs to me that if I was a [nationality] gold farmer, this system would not impede my efforts in the slightest.
I download the client. It takes six hours. Then we’re in:
Let’s see… set up the graphics. Log in. Watch the intro movie. Set up my key bindings…
There is no way to turn on auto mouselook.
I… I really feel an intense level of rage right now. I feel the need to kill a human being with my bare hands. I can’t believe that after all this time, it turns out Jack Thompson was right.
Google leads me to a thread where we learn that the game once had mouselook, but last year they removed it without explanation.
I am speechless.
Later: This tale has a happy ending, sort of. With the help of this program I was able to make the middle mouse button toggle the state of the right mouse button. So if I click MMB, it begins holding down RMB until such time as I click the MMB again. This means both games are now open to me.
Still… leaving out mouselook? In this day and age? Not even leaving it as a checkbox, disabled by default. But simply not having it at all. This feature is so trivial and has such an impact on usability. I need someone to give me a justification for the thinking behind this. Someone with access to the codebase. No, better yet: If you have access to the source code, then here is what you need to do:
1) Go to the code repository and check out mouse.cpp.
2) Add the four lines of code that I know it will take to turn this into a toggle. Just stick the option in the ini file where it can, at need, be turned on by civilized people who know what they’re doing. Don’t worry about adding it to the interface. Desperate times, and all.
3) Submit that bitch to go out with the next patch.
4) No, don’t ask your boss. Don’t bring this up in a meeting. Don’t submit this for review by a committee. Don’t run this by your obviously deficient QA department. Just suck it up and do it. Your worth as a software engineer and a human being is riding on your ability to make this right.
Alternatively: Quit your job as a programmer and find honest employment in some other field of work.
Anyway, I’m not sure which game will get my attention just yet. I’ve played about an hour of each and this could go either way. We’ll see which one strikes my funny bone first.
A Star is Born:
Let’s Play Champions Online Pt. 8
I’m in town, minding my own business and getting a big bunch of XP for killing Canadian terrorists, when the woman I’m talking to reveals that she’s actually under the control of the cloned brain I’ve been looking for.
Er. A what? I haven’t… I mean, I think I would remember if I’d been looking for something like that. I’ve been asked to to some pretty strange and sketchy stuff since getting here, but so far nobody has asked me to find a cloned brain.
Regardless, cloned brain wants to talk to me, and so invites me to come out into the wilderness. Okay then.
Up in the mountains I find…
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An astral projection. Of a clone. Of a giant brain. I have no idea what the etiquette is in a situation like this, but I guess I can rule out shaking hands.
Giant Brain tells me that he needs my help. I don’t know about helping an astral projection of a clone of a giant brain that was just mind-controlling a bystander in base, but he’s got a green outline when I mouse over him and it says “hero” under his name so… I guess he’s a good guy?
Luckily, Astral-Cloned-Giant-Brain is eager to prove that he’s on my side. As a token of friendship, he clues me in on some super-duper giant-brain level intel: Soldiers from Steelhead are being executed by the Hunter-Patriots. These executions are happening in the nearby valley.
This is not actually news to me. I mean, the Hunter-Patriots are terrorists. They’ve been shooting me on sight pretty much since I put an end to the NOT ORDINARY storm. I figured out they were bad news ages ago. I was actually in that same valley earlier when I was beating up those very same guys so I could steal their plans for their maple-powered death ray. And thank you so much for reminding me of that debacle, Astral-Cloned-Giant-Brain.
But ACGB thinks this is a news flash for a big-jawed tiny-brain like me, and he’s using it to try and convince me we’re on the same team. He asks me to go save a few Steelhead soldiers for him. Or for me. I’m not sure, really.
So… you’re proving your allegiance by telling me my mortal enemies are bad guys and then as a sign of good faith you ask me to rescue my own allies? Is this like one of those “so bad it’s good” deals, where a movie is so awful that you enjoy it? Except in your case it’s more like “so smart you drool on yourself and eat shoes”?
Right. Off to the crash site to beat up some Hunter-Patriot guys. Again.
I fly into the valley and look for groups of Hunter-Patriots gathered around Steelhead soldiers. About I dozen or so fights in, I glance up and notice I’m not making any progress on this mission. Checking the map, I see I’m just outside the mission area. So rescuing these Steelhead soldiers doesn’t count towards making me believe the brain is on my side.
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| Problems? Try PUNCHING! |
I move my traveling violence show to the other side of the valley and find punching these guys in the face to be far more convincing of the genuineness of Brain’s offer of friendship.
I return to ACGB, who tells me, “Now that I have helped you, I ask you to return the favor.” I assume he’s talking about the XP he just awarded me, since telling me to go and beat up my own enemies to save my own allies while he does nothing doesn’t fall within any definition of help that I understand.
Now the ACGB lays it all out and explains what’s really going on:
There is a bad guy called the Overbrain. He apparently clones brains, and then enslaves those brains through mind control. This seems like an insane level of effort with dubious return, but I’ve been working for Ravenspeaker, so it’s not like I have room to criticize the feasibility of what anyone else is doing.
ACGB here is not yet under the sway of the Overbrain, but a new shipment of mind-control gear is on its way and ACGB is sure he won’t be able to hold out if the Overbrain gets his hands on it. ACGB has confused the driver making the delivery and the new gear has been left down in the valley. I need to go blow it up.
So I need to go around, beat up some more Hunter-Patriot guys, and steal their explosives. Then use those explosives to explode the mind control gear.
It turns out the gear is in a simple crate and guarded by a couple of befuddled drivers.
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| Few people are familiar with the second Poincaré conjecture, which asks: “Would it be possible to make a videogame which contains no crates?” Many people believe it is possible, but it has yet to be proven. |
Several questions spring to mind:
1) It’s a crate. Why do I need to blow it up? I’ve lifted and smashed things larger and heavier than that by accident. While trying to talk to someone.
2) Actually, why destroy it up at all? I could fly that sucker back to Steelhead Base and they could take it apart to study. Or just put it in with the recyclables. Seems a waste to just blow it all up.
3) If we are going to blow it up, is this really what the good guys have come to? I have to scavenge explosives off of our foes? Heck, there is a flak gun ten feet away from the box, and the thing pounds the everlovin’ daylights out of me when I approach from the air. It seems like that thing would be a better source of explosives than wandering around, punching guys and swiping their hand grenades. It would actually be hilarious to swipe the crate and use it as a shield against the AA gun, thus tricking the bad guys into shooting their own stuff.
Brain? Are you listening? No? Sigh. Fine.
Astral-Cloned-Giant-Brain is really set on the plans he came up with and isn’t interested in listening to reason or the rude things I’m shouting at my computer. Okay, okay. Let’s get this over with.
I extract some explosives from the local terrorist population and then take the explosives to the crate of mind-control equipment and activate it. A progress bar fills up as I put the explosives into place. Once full, the box blows up in my face.
Somewhere in southern California, a game developer is laughing his ass off at me right now.
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| An explosion going off in my face as I use explosives I didn’t need to destroy something I could have smashed to help a floating brain I now hate. |
I return to the giant brain. He maintains that he is a super-smart brain and that he is my ally, despite the fact that the last job he gave me demonstrated that at least one of these facts must be false. At least.
Now he wants me to find a teammate…
Sigh. The teaming system.
Group combat is a mess in Champions Online. If you are in a team of three or more people, bad guys will automatically run to get reinforcements. When they do so, they get to retreat at running speed while blocking. (Players can’t do that.) It’s extremely difficult to stop the runner before he gets help, and chasing him will often drag you into crowds of foes, who will in turn all scatter for reinforcements, etc.
The thing is, the bad guys do this even if your team-mates aren’t anywhere to be seen. If you’re in a group of three people, it’s folly to enter combat while your compatriots are back in town, because the bad guys will smell the scent of a team player on you and run off for help. You’ll end up fighting gangs intended for three people. This means anytime one person takes a break, everyone needs to. So once you join a group, you must stick together or you’ll be worse off than the guy next to you who’s working solo. Actually, you’ll be worse off than him either way.
Just as you mop up one group, another one rushes in along with the guy who originally ran off, and someone from that group will go get another, and another, yea, even unto the seventh generation. Bad guys will even get reinforcements from mortal enemies. They will do so even if the reinforcements are way too strong for your party. They will do so even if the reinforcements are so far away they can’t even be seen from your current location. They will also go for whatever help is “closest” when looking at the map, even if that means jumping off a cliff. This is really annoying when doing a “rescue” mission where a civilian is cowering in the face of (say) four foes. You wipe out three, but the fourth one gets away and goes on walkabout. Then you’re all alone with the NPC you’re trying to save, but he doesn’t consider himself “saved” until his attackers are all dead – even the one halfway across the map who is trying to talk a group of terrorists to help him out fighting these superheroes.
These annoyances are compounded by the low-XP approach the game has towards combat. Enemies aren’t worth fighting for XP, and being in a group has you fighting a lot more. Sure, three people can mow through foes faster than one, but not nearly enough to make up for what the game throws at you and the hassle of needing to stick together.
What you get is this: Our team assaults a group of four level 18 robot cowboys. One of them runs off into the desert. We mop up the other three. Hey… wasn’t there a fourth guy here? I don’t see him. Did someone else kill him? Did you? I don’t know. Then we move onto the next group. Halfway through that, the runner returns with a group of level 26 escaped convicts, who proceed to wipe our party.
I’ve gone to level 25 entirely through grouping, and I’ve gone all the way to 30 while soloing. I can say it is actually a handicap to be in a group. It’s far better to disband your team and simply travel around together. (Our team didn’t do this though. We sucked it up and played the game they way you’re “supposed to”. The only time we disbanded was for an escort mission, because the reinforcements kept going after the guy we were supposed to protect. The mission went from nigh-impossible to stupidly easy just by disbanding.)
Once in a while you’ll run into a forced-teaming mission where it says you need three people and players will just go to a mandatory-teaming boss and just camp out until another hero shows up. Then – without forming a team – they both rush in and pound on the boss. Once he’s down they go their separate ways.
I can see how they intended for the reinforcements to make grouping more interesting, but instead it wound up making teaming a cumbersome chore that everyone works to avoid, which then makes forced-teaming missions like the one Star On Chest is about to do into a hassle. Almost nobody groups in this game. Champions Online is a Massively Singleplayer Online Game.
…and go after the Overmind. I have no idea why he didn’t just have me go after the Overmind first. I guess he’s just way too smart to take such an obvious and clean route to victory, and would rather send me to suicide-bomb crates of electronics first.
Right. So I need to fight the Overbrain, and his henchman, Ape Plus. The Overbrain has been working to mind-control the Hunter-Patriots to make them into his personal army. Is that bad? I mean, they’re already terrorists. If the Overbrain controls them, maybe that’s an improvement? We still have the same total number of bad guys to fight. They’ll just be doing Overbrain stuff instead of Terrorist stuff.
Here is what I’m going to do: I’m going to solo this job.
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| Being that we’re after something called “The Overbrain”, you can be forgiven for thinking he’s the red brain thing to my right. The brain in the tube is actually our “friend”, who has been astrally projecting himself. This is his real self. I guess. The little floating doohickey behind that tube is the Overbrain. Ape Plus is there on the left. He’s big. |
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| Oh thank you, thank you, thank you Cryptic entertainment for countering your broken teaming system with equally broken and unbalanced superpowers. Thank you for giving me regeneration, which lets me finish off Ape-Plus and then hold down the BLOCK BUTTON for twenty seconds to heal up while the Overbrain and his henchmen annoy me with their attacks. |
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| I’m sorry, Overbrain, but I can’t hear you over the sound of you getting your ass kicked. It seems like I attacked during some sort of terrorist-union-mandated break, since they guys behind me aren’t getting involved. |
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So… astral brain guy. Nice to meet you in person. Or whatever. You know what I mean. Say, aren’t you a bit… you know… cold?
So, under the direction of a giant floating brain I freed the terrorists from the control of a tiny floating brain so that they will be once again free to terrorize the unpopulated Canadian wastes.
Is that a win for the good guys or not? I can’t even tell anymore.
Next time: For those of you who are sick of Canada, now it’s time for… MORE OF THE SAME!
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Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
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Programming Vexations
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Top 64 Videogames
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The Best of 2019
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