No, this isn’t the comic I was trying to make on Monday. I’d wanted to do a Breen thing, where he ends up trying to make fun of Blizzard’s Real ID only to have Metro tell him the joke was now irrelevant. Eh. I kind of feel like the moment has passed on that one by now. So instead we’re talking about Alan Wake for some reason?
So I’m playing WoW again, and mucking around trying to remember all my old macros and get the interface just so. Sometimes in my googling about I’ll come across images like this one:
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Of course, the game doesn’t look like this until you get to the endgame, and I understand that not all classes turn into giant control panels, but it’s still an amazing thing to behold. I can’t think of anything else in gaming that gets to be this complex. Not X-com. Not the number-crunchy sports management games. Not the turn-based war sims. No RTS game expects you to digest this much input and I’ve never seen this many buttons onscreen at once in any of them.
There are probably games with more strategic depth, but in terms of interface density, WoW (and similar games) are playthings of tremendous complexity.
The story so far:
A water purifier that has no reason to exist was overloaded by a man with laughable motivations and released radiation it shouldn’t have, thus killing Colonel Autumn, who had no reason to be there. Then later we got through a village of children who fdso gah frrzlmpr blaaa huygggnl asdf;lj so we could enter vault 87 and recover a GECK, a device which would be better put to use in virtually any possible manner besides the one for which we had acquired it. Then Colonel Autumn, who shouldn’t be alive, captured us with a flash grenade that shouldn’t have worked.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
The true madness is that the plot is this mangled, despite the repeated railroading and plot hacks used by the writers. I can understand that a freeform or branching story can get pretty complex and possibly tangled. As someone who has run D&D games I know that no plan survives contact with the enemy. (Your players.) And I’ve had some gaps in my stories. But When the main plot is set in stone and the player has no power over it, there is no excuse for not simply writing something that makes sense. In most cases I’d pummel a game over things like pacing, characterization, maintaining tension and interest, and all of those other challenges that good writers must overcome. But here we’re talking about basic coherence. We’re talking about simply relaying a fixed set of events that don’t contradict one another. For example: Don’t have multiple characters come back from the dead without offering anything in the way of acknowledgment or explanation.
This will no doubt disappoint more than a few people, but my next Let’s Play series is actually just my last one. Go read it, if you like. Or, stick around and read some ramblings about why we’re doing a re-run and what I’m working on next.
The thing is, these things take time to write. Lulzy’s tale clocked in at ~50,000 words, which is just long enough to count as a novel. Add in the fact that each entry required several hours of gameplay and then the time it takes to add in all the screenshots, and we’re talking about a non-trivial amount of work.
I’ve spent the last couple of months casting about, looking for a new MMO. Trek Online is fantastic in terms of setting. (True science fact: It is impossible for there to be too much Trek satire in the universe. If you were to go back in time and replace everything ever written with Star Trek satire, then history itself would be full of plot holes. Actually, that sounds like a pretty standard setup for a Trek episode.) I wrote a few pages of stuff for it, but the game itself had almost nothing in the way of story. Most missions were just generic fill-in-the-blank auto-generated filler. My material was almost completely divorced from the game itself and was basically just fan fiction. That’s not a horrible idea, but it’s not what I want for this series.
I tried a couple of other games, but none of them really grabbed me. APB was so monotonous and devoid of fun that I don’t think I could bring myself to play it for any length of time, no matter how much amusement you might get out of it. D&D Online looked possible, but I didn’t want to go buying little bits and pieces of content à la carte, looking for stuff that would be fun to cover.
So we got down to the end of Lord of the Rings and I didn’t have a new series ready. I didn’t even have a game lined up. I suggested we run a condensed version of my Champs series instead of just going on hiatus, and that’s how we got where we are now. Most Escapist readers haven’t seen it, so it will be new to them and will keep my spot warm while I come up with new content.
I’ll be shortening the series a bit by combining some of the shorter entries and cutting some of the longer digressions on gameplay.
I’m playing WoW again and noodling around with ideas. Well, actually I’m just leveling a couple of characters. I emailed Blizzard twice trying to re-activate my old account. (Which I can no longer log into since to migration of WoW accounts to Battle.net accounts.) After a week they finally got around to sending me an auto-generated email saying, “please tell us again you need help or we’ll just pretend the whole thing is resolved.” And no that is not a joke. So, I punished their ineptitude and apathy by purchasing the game again. I’m hoping someday they will all be crushed to death under a mountain of All Our Money.
But now I’m on a brand new account and cut off from all of my old contacts and characters. I forgot what a hassle it is to try and play this game fresh like this. No bags, so you’re constantly starved for storage, which makes it hard to earn money, which is bad because you’re flat broke, which makes it hard to get the upgrades you need, which impairs your leveling, etc.
I rolled on Kirin Tor (Alliance) simply because that’s where I lived last time around. I’m probably going to find another roleplay style server and roll some Horde characters as well.
Every week we sit down to record this show and I think, “Dangit, I’m out of ideas. I have no idea what else I can say about this game.” Then when we’re done I feel frustrated because I feel like there was so much to say I couldn’t really fit it all in.
But next week. Next week I’m totally out of things to say. For sure.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
And for comparison, here is the art style of the original supermutants:
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My two great tragedies: Steam working, and not being able to grow a mustache.
I click “Play Garry’s Mod”:
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Actually Valve, that wasn’t a request. It was an order. Run the software I bought from you. I’m busy too. I’m trying to make a comic, and I didn’t ask you to get involved.
Sigh. Fine…
I click “Restart in Offline Mode”:
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Yes, yes. Just piss off and get out of my way already.
I click “Play Garry’s Mod”:
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I record this here because every single time we have a Steam debate we get fanboys who wave in the direction of offline mode every time someone has a problem with the platform.
As always: Use Steam or do not. I do not evangelize either position. Like everything else, it is a decision with many complex tradeoffs. I only urge people to be aware of what they’re buying into when they do it. I would like to also urge Valve to get their collective act together.
There is a very real possibility that we will get no comic tomorrow, the first miss in 210 strips. This is not entirely Valve’s fault, mind you. Lots of other factors contributed to this hellish span of 24 hours that everyone else is calling “Monday”. But Steam failed when I needed it and added to the already considerable misfortunes of the day.
EDIT: The “please try again in a few minutes” starts to sound really hollow after two freakin’ hours.
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
T w e n t y S i d e d
