Questioning ones self

One of my many web-comics on my reading list for a long time has been Dark Legacy – a crudely drawn, World of Warcraft based comic. The same artist also has a shorter series called the Stonemaker Argument. This one in particular prodded my head when I read it today, mostly regarding my NaNoWriMo writing.

Not only am I writing Science-Fiction, I’m trying to keep it somewhat accurate. I say somewhat because, well, I’m not an engineer (well, I’m a software engineer, but that doesn’t really involve much planetary settlement or space-borne scampery) so keeping it accurate gets quite challenging. I take my inspirations from the giants that went before me, the books I’ve read, the ideas contained within them, and attempt to tell a story more than anything. The details are left fuzzy intentionally, not out of some sense of being ‘wrong’ – It’s speculative fiction, people have written pages and pages hammering their favourite sci-fi technology into the physics that we know (Most of Star Trek, and all of Star Wars) – no, It’s not about being proven wrong, it’s more about trying not to be boring. There’s a limit to which readers will sit and read numbers and statistics and reams and reams of data.

It’s not just Sci-fi that has this problem either. Fantasy does too. There is inevitably a time when the backstory of a world must be exposed, or a journey must be undertaken. Political machinations, wars, old gods, evil demons and the likes, and there’s a horrible attraction to dumping it out  in excrutiatingly minute detail. There’s only so much one can read about hobbits walking through fields.

Then there’s the flip side of the coin. Not being accurate enough. Leaving gaping holes in your story that are never filled, ruining the suspension if disbelief. So you have faster than light travel do you? Just how does that work? your readers will ask. And how can you do it without hearing the chants of ‘been done before’ or ‘too long, didn’t read’.

We’ll take the idea of FTL and run down a few ideas. There are, in my view, only three kinds of FTL

1) Instant. You are in one point, then you are in another. It’s instant. Think the new Battlestar Galactica series, or for you old school guys, the ones found in Asimov’s Foundation/Empire stories. You could even consider Trek’s transporters in this category, but I do not know if they travel faster than light.

2) Linear. You can travel faster than light just like you can below light speed. You have a finite actual speed and take time (albeit faster than light does) to get to a place. Think Star Trek’s Warp Drive, or Star Wars Hyperdrive.

3) Wormholes. You travel sub-light through a region of space that connects two places. It’s not intantaneous, but it’s pretty fast. Think Farscape, Contact, or the later Trek’s Transwarp Conduits.

So you see the difficulty. It’s all been done. So how do you differentiate? You have to do something. It’s normally a case of re-writing the laws of Physics. In the case of Trek, they fold space around the ship – or so the lore goes – allowing it to travel faster than light without breaking relativity. In the case of Star Wars, physics is thrown out of the window in favour of some cool special effects.

Trek talked alot. It wasn’t hard Sci-fi, it didn’t try to be, it was definitly Soft, almost Pulp at times. The problem is that they talked alot. They spouted technobabble and rambled on incoherently. Not even making the slightest bit of sense.

Star Wars didn’t let Science get in the way of a good yarn.

I’ve watched enough trek to be indoctrinated in it’s ways, but I wouldn’t call myself a Trekkie. I was one of the people who enjoyed Enterprise for it’s almost complete lack of Treknobabble and focus on people stories.

So while Science has it’s place in Science Fiction (obviously), it shouldn’t be the raison d’etré of the book. You have to know in advance how much you want to inform the reader and space it out over the course of the book. Don’t dump it at once, don’t make words up, and don’t go over your limit or it’ll read like a textbook.

Armistice Day

Today is Armistice Day. On 11/11/1918 at 11:00 the First World War ended.

4 years of bloodshed over.

While the day is set aside mainly to remember the dead, we must also remember what was birthed during it.

Cryptography, Aviation advances, Tank warfare, expansion of the Railroads, Submarines.

And not just technology. We got poetry, the likes of Seigfried Sasson and Wilfred Owen.

 

 

What confuses me about Armistice day however, is why people turn on the radio to listen to the minutes silence.

 

NaNoWriMo Update

So long as the ideas keep flowing, I’ll keep writing. That’s my mantra for NaNoWriMo. I’ve been to two Write-ins so far, and while the first wasn’t so productive (it seems our venue has a weekly Jazz Band playing on Wednesday nights) the Saturday one saw me write a massive 1,200 words in the space of two hours.

I’m currently in no shortage of ideas, I have a clear plan for where the novel is going, even if it’s not crystalised completely. The setup is almost done (13,000 words and I’ve not even gotten to the ‘incident’ that shapes the story) and I’ve got a chapter-by-chapter plan for the first 2/3rds of the book (atleast, the main themes for each chapter, what they introduce and what questions are raised)

I’ve faced a few challenges so far. One of which is avoiding boring Info-Dump monologues that litter the sci-fi genre. I’ve gotten to chapter 6 without one, trying to explain the world through a mixture of imagery and exposition rather than reading like a textbook. Although it’s been a narrow escape with chapter 5, which nearly turned into one long conversation with no development of character. I decided to split it into two, with a short pace-changing chapter between them.

Another challenge facing me is the fact that I’ve not done any real creative writing since School. It’s been a good 7 years ago atleast since I wrote anything, and even then it’s always been one of those short “well done, Gold Star” style affairs.

If you’ll indulge me, I’ll regail you all now with a little history of me and books.

At school, I was nearly put off reading entirely by a rather… lecherous… English teacher in my final year. One who would rather oggle the maturing young woman in my class than help a student in need. Incidently, he was the only Male English teacher I had so maybe he wasn’t unique.

Luckilly, but not immediately obvious, Dr Asimov came to my rescue. During that year we had to choose a book to do our final essay on. I chose Foundation. I was never really enamoured with it, and didn’t really read it. I realise now, with full 20-20 hindsight, that I’d rather read a book and enjoy it, than be forced to read a book and analyse it.

It was only two years later, when I was at University that I spotted the sequel, Foundation and Empire in Ottakars (Sadly now owned by Waterstones) and rediscovered a love of Science Fiction. I bought each of the sequels, and the a few Robot novels (including The Complete Robot). It was a good time to buy as my Student card got me a whopping 90p off each book. Enough for a round at the Student Union.

By mid 2004 I had a sizeable collection of Asimov books, but somewhere along the line I had lost my original Foundation novel. I returned to Ottakars to see if they had it (This was at the same time as the 2004 ‘film’ was doing the rounds) and lo and behold they did. I took it to the cash desk and the guy behind the counter looked at me and said “Were you looking for I, Robot? I’m afraid we’re sold out,”

I was quite taken aback, I looked him in the eye and said, “No, this is the one I was looking for,” he returned a knowing smile. We exchanged vitriol over the film adaptation while he rung up the book. Incidently, I don’t think I bought another book from that store before it closed.

I found Prelude to Foundation in Waterstones, and in it was a whole list of books in the Foundation/Robots series, including three books in the middle (the Empire novels) that were currently out of print. Once I had finished the book, I sought out to find these missing novels on the internet.

I managed to get old, battered and well read copies of Pebble in the Sky, The Currents of Space, and The Stars, Like Dust on Amazon.

Eventually I had a library full of Asimov. I realised that I wanted to read more, but couldn’t, because I had everything Asimov that was worth reading.

I eventually purchased a number of classics, Farenheight 451 by Ray Bradbury, Do androids dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick and a compliation of all of Arthur C. Clarkes Short Stories. On the back of that one I began reading Clarkes joint efforts with Stephen Baxter, of which Times Eye is undoubtably the best. (I put it down to Clarke having more influence over the direction the novel took, before his health deteriorated, while the others were more Baxter)

Somewhere in the middle of all this I read the Hitchickers Guide to the Galaxy’s Trilogy of Four. (I know it’s more now)

One thing I’ve noticed is that all of these have influenced my writing style. From Clarke’s grounded-in-reality near-futurism to Asimov’s plotlines of intrigue and lies (Caves of steel and the likes were just Detective novels set in the future) to DNA’s near insanity. Sometimes it’s a struggle to keep the story going in one direction without veering off wildly like H2G2, sometimes I start explaining things in depth too much like Clarke (despite me having but a light grasp of astronomy and engineering) and then trying to reign it back for fear of boring the reader with technobabble.

Hell, I’ve written 900 words on this blog post… *beats self up* Get back to writing!

Gone writin’

Watch my progress

Left 4 Dead 2 Demo Issues

If you’ve got it, you’ve got it. If you don’t, you don’t.

That’s pretty much how I sum up the demo. I’ve only managed to play it once (for 15 minutes, at lunchtime, at work, with bots) but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The new special infected are excellent, the new normal infected variants are fantastic (Including the kevlar clad riot-zombies who are a bastard to kill)  and the new weapons are meatier, funkier and gorier than before. I found myself a machette melee weapon (that replaces your pistol) and hacked my way through most of the first map.

The demo is fun to play, definitly, but I’d urge people not to pre-order it just yet (if all you’re doing it for is to get the demo) as there are issues with launching it.

I managed it as I started playing shortly after it was released, but when I got home I, and my friend, found that neither of us could launch the game (“This game is currently unavailible” error), even after restarting (logging in and out manually too) it refused to play. It seems that Valves servers are either taking one hell of a pounding, or someone somewhere’s put the wrong config up and that means we can’t decrypt our game to play it, or they’ve given us an incorrect file and it doesn’t realise it. Certainly, the steam forums were down most of yesterday too so there was no help until this morning, and it appears that I’m not the only one with the problem, and while there’s nothing official, there may be a fix

The Scores on the Doors

The new Champions Online: State of the Game has been published. Just let me get something out in the air before I start, something I said last week

After Blood Moon, Cryptic need to come up with more End-game content. Not just more, but interesting content …  If the next Content release from Cryptic is merely the Christmas Event, then I may just call it quits.

So other than the Blood Moon event (which appears to have some serious bugs, was not well thought out and generally a pain in the arse for anyone who only plays for an hour or so a night) what has Cryptic added for the long term from this?

First off is the British Bulldog style PvP map, Zombie Apocalypse. Where when one person falls, they become a zombie and have to then attack their comrades. While I’ve not played it yet, it sounds a refreshing change to the standard PvP mix of Deathmatch, CTF and base assault, and I can honestly say I’ve heard nothing like it in other MMOs. Whether or not it works or not is yet to be seen. For now that’s +1 to Cryptic

There are then some bug fixes for Blood moon. I mean, serious bug fixes, like faulty boss respawns and not sharing credit cross-team for the public quests, stuff that shouldn’t have made it out of the test server. I’d call that -1 to Cryptic

New 18-21 missions in MC to fill out a minor levelling gap which, to be honest, I never noticed at all (on any character) but will undoubtably help take some of the monotony out of levelling alts. I give that a +1 to Cryptic.

Crossover Missions is basically just sharing missions if a player has completed, or not eligible for the mission. With that player then getting the XP and rewards from it. It’s a good idea, encouraging more grouping, something that is really needed in this game. another +1 to Cryptic

Flashbacks is, essentially, going back and playing missions you’ve completed previously. Now, I know this would be fun for one or two missions, well, actually, there’s nothing off the top of my head that I’d want to do again that I’d missed. I’m sure some people might, and it might encourage machinima artists to play the game (the ability to re-use any map in the game would be quite a draw), but for me this is just meh, I can’t give Cryptic any points for this, so I won’t.

I have to deduct points for mindless hyperbole though,

There is a new repeatable Lair in the works that will feature some very special villains, as well as one that will shake you to the core of your reality.

Just say “There are new lairs in the works” if you want to be vague about it. If you want to be more specific, give us some damn information. -1 Point to Cryptic.

There are minor balance changes coming to passives and travel powers. Buffs or nerfs? No idea. No information given other than they’re being looked at. Nice to know, but without specifics, nil-points for that.

So, this state of the game currently sits at +1 point to Cryptic, which means it’s been a bit meh, but not pointless and the game has progressed slightly. But we have one more point to cover

We’re also starting work on our Winter Event that will roll out in December. And then there’s the very big surprise we have in store for early 2010…

Note my Quote above (-1 Point). Granted, we have a new repeatable lair in the works, but the vagueness of the information belies any confidence that it’ll be anything more than just another 5-man instance, something that we already have. The Winter Event, while obvious it was coming, should not have come before the ‘big surprise’ – which I’m sure everyone is hoping is one of three things. Multi-team raids (Ala Hamidom from CoH, or even raids like WoW) is one, increased level cap is the second, and Multi-Nemesis missions (The League of Destruction thing) is the third.

It’s likely going to be LoD, which wouldn’t be much of a surprise, but considering I’m not getting any nemesis minions spawning since I hit 40 I only have two Nemesis’, one of which I’ve only done the opening mission, I don’t see me having enough Nemesis characters to form the league.

Unfortunatly, each of these should have been in the works from day one. Instead, what we’ve had over the last two months is, undoubtably, an extended beta test. I hate resorting to that kind of language, but we have. They only recently filled the 30-35 content gap with repeatable missions, major issues with the lacklustre end-game, Lemuria’s epic lag, bugged PQs (I still know of atleast 2 that are bugged, one in MC and one in Monster Island), and because of these PQs, no-one will do any other PQ incase they  go through it and  it bugs out on them. (-1 Point)

We have 5 Daily quests to do, 2 Repeatable Lairs and no Epic Raids.

These are the issues that need looked at, and these are the issues that are missing from this state of the game, hell the should have been addressed before the game was launched.

I’m going to reference World of Warcraft at launch, so don’t hate me. It had, at launch, UBRS, LBRS, Scholomance, Stratholme and Blackrock Depths for it’s 5 man instances, that’s 5, plus Molten Core and Onyxia, the 40-man raid instances. Within one month they released a Massive 3-part instance, Mauradon for mid-levels. It’s been nearly two months of Champions and the only things we’ve had are bug fixes and content fillers.

I’ll compare it to a contemporary MMO, Fallen Earth, which, from release, has a fully developed end-game. While it’s not a traditional MMO, it does have it’s priorities right. Content first. Keep your players entertained. In 2 months, yes, they’ve announced major improvements coming very soon. These are major improvements. Player housing alone is worth it’s own update patch. Champions has yet to nail down it’s end game.

There is still time for Cryptic to pull it around, show us that their development cycle can produce a patch without game-breaking bugs, show us that they can design content that is interesting, fun and challenging, otherwise CO will slip into mediocrity and I hold little hope out for Star Trek Online in that case.

It’s nearly 2010

Every few days for the last few weeks I’ve looked at the date and gone “Shit, it’s nearly 2010″ closley followed by “and we’ve not even sent a man to Jupiter”

Lego Universe

Ever since I was a wee nipper I have played with LEGO, those little coloured blocks from Denmark. Now I hear tell that there is a LEGO MMO coming out. Honestly, I’ve known about the LEGO MMO for some time now but last I checked the site was almost non-existent, but now theres quite a bit on info and quite a few mini-games on there.

The game is aimed at kids. Lets get this straight. Like Free Realms it’s cutesy graphics and myriads of mini games to keep the nippers occupied. The only thing is, it’s going to be more like  Second Life for kids than Free Realms.

What Second Life and LEGO have in common is the ability to build whatever your imagination can think up, and if you’ve ever been in Second Life you can see that some people have quite filthy imaginations. One of the main problems that will face LEGO are those people who will deliberatly attempt to create… shall we say… rather ‘blue’ items.

They’ll either need a decent heuristic for detecting the ol’ cock n balls constructs, a team of GMs looking out for this kind of thing (ie a Knob Squad), or delete content as it’s reported.

A Heuristic would be hard, and nigh on impossible to verify 100%, so that’d need to be put along side something else, either the Knob Squad or a report button.

The problem with a report button is that your children will already have been scarred by Jimmy McScroteface’s Giant Golden Phallus fountain by the time that person’s kicked and banned, and it’s also a problem with the Knob Squad (although it’s mitigated slightly by catching some early on)

Targeting a multiplayer sandbox game at kids is going to attract the nastiest kind of people, and I honestly worry that some kid is going to come across some guy’s LEGO orgy, (Remember Rule 34) his mum will be watching, and go straight to the tabloids.

I’m not saying it’ll be rampant. Far from it, but it only takes one voice to shout FIRE in a commuter train to cause a disaster.

Whoop whoop! Here comes the fashion police!

I must aplaud Blizzards art team. They have done a stellar job with World of Warcraft. Seriously, despite my previous complaints about how crap some of the tier gear looks (Druids and Rogue tier 10 in particular) my general disposition is favourable. The previews of the Priest Tier 10 have come out and boy, do they look awesome. Mostly.

The Blue/white one (left) is particularly well done. It fits the character style well, the colours don’t clash, they blend well and fit the ideal of a priest well. It’s probably the nicest tier gear I’ve seen in a while.

Unfortunatly, the re-colours aren’t as good. The first recolour is excellent, a rich royal purple with highlights of gold and deep burgandy, but flipped around in the second recolour, the horrible mash puts me in mind of some kind of radioactive purple draped over a high-visibility jacket. While the final recolour looks more at home on a Warlock, with it’s bright fel-green trim bringing similar complaints about the druid gear being ‘deathified’ or ‘fel-ified’, just generally ‘evilified’. Yes, we have dark, nasty shadow preists, but they’re hardly channelers of fel energy. I think the first recolour is more akin to a shadow priests tastes than any of the others.

Now, can someone, anyone, please help this distressed looking Paladin? While the holy fire bursts from his sturdy, trustworthy plate armour, it appears that he’s broken his neck, and has been bandaged up by someone who’s into practical jokes… a Pink Neckbrace? What’s next, a giant cardboard cone to prevent him gnawing on his mange?

Besides this flaw, I love the colouring on it. Drops of Saphires embedded in the armour, the chunkiness of the shoulderpads, the fire bursting forth from it. Even the recolours are nice (yes, even the green one) as none of them have that awful glowing neon scum that adornes some of the other tier gear. It does seem slightly top-heavy, maybe if  the lower armour was chunkier it would balance out a bit, as at the moment it looks like he could tip over. His center of gravity being somewhere near his neckbrace.

Memories

Installing a new Operating system is like moving house, or at the very least, redecorating. Just as you have to pack everything up into boxes before you move home, so to do you have to pack everything away when moving Operating System.

Just like moving home then, you dig out those old photo albums that you’ve forgotten about, and have a look through them. I found this picture, dated 21st April 2006, and my first Kill of Ragnaros, and the first Horde-side kill on our server, Khadgar-EU. The Guild was Bovine Intervention, and we owned.

I just want to take the time and analyze the image slightly. It’s a window into a time long passed, 3 and a half years. At this point in time I was at University, and thus, was the prime candidate for Hard Core Raiding.
April 21st 2006 was a Friday, however before you chasten me for wasting a friday night, check the time on it, 2:59 am. This raid started on a Thursday Night and finished a long time later. Fatigued and drowsy, we managed to keep 40 people up and raiding to the wee small hours of the morning. For an idea of how frantic the last few seconds were, I had totally abandoned my healing duties in favour of wrath spam. (Seen a the screenshot taken seconds beforehand)

Note the powers and items on my hotbar. I had Whipper root tubers alongside potions, bandages and fel runes. Compare that to today, when, as a DPS or healer, I never carry potions other than one endless mana potion. My power bar is almost entirely Healing Touch, every rank you can think of, back in the day when you could cast Rank 1 at 2s for almost no mana, and with your +Healing keep the tank up through normal DPS. Nowadays you can’t cast anything but max rank, and with Cataclysm, ranks are being removed entirely in favour of auto scaling powers. I had fire resistence gear. Who has resistence gear any more? The last time I saw resistence gear was only for tanking Hydross in TBC.

Look at the buffs. This was only shortly after the raid-wide buffs were implimented. Look at “Gift of the Zandalar”, we had come straight out of a full Zul’aman clear to come pound down Ragnaros (we had cleared the other bosses earlier in the week). You just don’t get those kind of buffs any more for cashing in end-game bosses. It was one of the reasons people downed Onyxia, or Hakkar, or (if you were going to do Classic Naxxramas), Nefarian, was to get the head buff before going off for other raids. It was a way of keeping old content relevant that you just don’t see today.

So much so rose tinted spectacles.

It took 40 people an entire night, a full raid instance and a week of preperation to down the final boss in the game. It was time consuming, it was hellish. There was nothing else to do in the game except raid. I had spent the entire first year on another server where no-one did raids. The only thing to do was UBRS, which frankly got boring. The Ahn’Qiraj event livened things up a bit for non-raiders, but once it was over it was over.

Nowadays the final boss of the game can be downed by 10 people playing casually. The content can be experienced at leisure, and what do you know, it’s still fun. People are less stressed when they can strole through it, banter is high throughout the whole game. There is little or no cursing or swearing  like there used to be and preparing for a raid requires nothing more than repairing your armour and getting buff reagents.

Every single druid in that picture was a healer. There were no Feral tanks, there was no Balance DPS. There. was. no. moonkin. form. Every warrior was a tank, every priest healed, as did every Shaman (Pink names in those days were Shaman, before the cross pollination). There was no room in the game for hybrids. You did what your class did best and that was it. Now I’ve seen Paladin tanks, Deathknight Tanks, Druid tanks, hell, I’ve seen a Shaman hold his own on Patchwerk. There’s a maleability and merging that allows groups to form more easilly than the old days.

My healing hotbar is still full of heals. But now it’s full of different heals. Ones that do HoTs, ones that consume them, ones  that are fast cast, some that are slow and big. There’s insta-casts and cooldowns. You never use them all. Not on the one fight. Healing has it’s own style now. A druid healer could be a HoT Monster, easilly keeping up large groups of allies against incoming DPS, or it could be a Main Tank’s prop, throwing the large heals. I can’t speak for priests, as I’ve never played one at high level, nor Paladins, but looking at their powerset gives me the impression it’s the same for them.

Why, you ask, if I’m so happy about the game compared to where it was, am I no longer playing?

Boredom.

While the mechanics of the game have been polished to a spit shine, the actual content itself, while simpler to group for, is begining to insult.

I don’t want to be up till 3am playing WoW just to down Ragnaros, but I also don’t want to plough through Naxx 25 in 3 hours on an alt (which is what we were doing, pre Ulduar), gobbling up Epics like they were some sweet sweet candy. It takes all the fun out of the game if it doesn’t atleast feel like a challenge, and the Colosseum was the final nail in the coffin. It was bland, it was boring, it was too short and too repetitive.

If I hear good things about Icecrown I may consider going back, but my plans for the moment are to stick with CO for another month, then see where the MMO Space leaves me. I may end up back in Fallen Earth, which is both challenging and fun, but is also incredibly buggy and unstable for me at the moment.

My next confirmed visitation to WoW will be for Cataclysm, and finally, a chance to level a priest. A Goblin no less, and through what will hopefully be something as fresh as a new MMO, and as polished and fun as WoW could ever be.

On the count of three... moo...