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Meanwhile… over on Youtube

Incase anyone keeps coming here wondering what’s going on with the lack of updates, well:

Youtube happened. If I ever get the itch to do another long article I’m likely going to VLog it. I’ll be doing some Guild Wars 2 Videos when it comes out and I’ll keep doing Tribes Ascend update videos for the foreseable future.

I’ve done one VLog, Dave Talks Microtransactions and a review of Quantum Conundrum which contains alot of swearing.

[Minecraft] Mercy, and Blowing your cock off

A couple of minecraft videos. One is of Mercy, which is now slightly less under construction. But with a server reset looming all building work has kinda ground to a halt. Never mind.

And also some Redstone Shenannigans with a Redstone TNT cannon that fires beyond the render distance.

[Minecraft] A Glimpse of Mercy

Well, I’ve been playing on the ShaBooZey Minecraft server and, well, I’ve been helping to build the town of Mercy.

Here’s a few video glimpses of what we’ve been up to.

An extract of Unity

About 3 years ago I took part in NaNoWriMo, an initiative to get people writing novels by giving you 1 month to write at 50,000 word story. The story I decided to write was a Science-fiction story called “Unity”, and was based on an idea I’d been throwing about for about 4 years prior, but never got around to writing. This was the perfect excuse. I ended up writing about quite a bit of it, but realised after reading it again that most of it was terrible.

The ideas were sound. I had a good premise and enough issues I wanted to deal with. The problems stemmed from having far too many characters, having no real story and certainly no drama or tension. I certainly didn’t want to read it.

A year passed, and another NaNo arrived. I wrote something different. I wrote with my mistakes in mind. I had a core set of four characters who would play off each other. I had a limited setting and a general direction for the plot. Unfortunately, that still wasn’t enough. I ran out of steam and just wrote because I felt I had to. I reached about 20,000 words by the end and most of it was still terrible.

This time it was the lack of a plan that scuppered me. I had one in Unity, but it needed scaling down from the colossal scope it had been originally. I took the four character idea from my second NaNo and as a result I merged my cast of about 10 characters into those core 4. I took the limited setting idea and expanded on it slightly so that I don’t get location fatigue, but not so much that I had to spend pages describing new locations every chapter.

After a couple of false starts I decided to stop trying to write linearly. I started at the end. I wrote the climax first. The final chapter where everything comes to a head. My characters were my focus. They drove the story, and showcased the issues I wanted to highlight.

I planned each characters development and anchored it at the end, fixed in point. It gave me a situation to aim for from the starting position I’d already well developed in my mind.

My slow on/off pace of writing worked. A year after starting again I’ve written 16,000 words. Yes, less than I wrote in a single month, but of generally higher quality than the rushed NaNo version. Yes, there’s the odd information dump, and a few walls of text, maybe some stilted dialogue, but nothing that a good editing once-over won’t fix once the thing’s complete.

Here’s a quick primer on the story. The Blurb if you will. After which will be an extract from near the beginning of the story.

Unity – Humanity’s first extra-solar colony. Out of contact with Earth, it has to fend for itself. It’s power structure, carefully crafted before creation, becomes fractured as headstrong personalities clash. The Bureaucratic and Orwellian Security Corps face off against the Socialist Liberty Alliance who value personal freedoms and civil liberties above all else. Locked in a cold war that threatens at any moment to erupt into a full scale conflict that would destroy everything they worked so hard to create. However, even in the depths of space, the hidden hand of the Colony’s corporate sponsors manages to reach out and stir trouble.

[First Impression] Tribes Ascend

I have been having Alot of fun with this.

And a little tutorial on one of the more abstract control methods ever devised in a computer game.

[Review] Pineapple Smash Crew

[SWTOR] Space combat Mini Game Review

[SWTOR] Divad Canazza – Lawful Stupid Masochist

Six weeks is probably the longest I’ve ever taken to level a character to maximum level. Not even my first MMO character ever, an Orc Hunter called Bel Riose, took that long. This is probably due to two factors. One of which is the fact that Bioware made a game where I want to read the quest log, or in this case watch the cut-scene. It’s so unnaturally immersive when you’ve been used to the stale old walls of text from practically every other MMO in existence. Even Champions Online and DCUO had walls of text that were pretty much required to know what the quest was about, even though at the time they were released they had the most spoken dialogue of any MMO.

The second reason it took so long was, well, I chose to level as a healer. The last time I levelled as a healer was in WoW, with a druid. I gave up half-way through after I spend a full 30 minutes soloing the then-elite Bhagthera in Stranglethorn Vale and being thoroughly sick of it.

Thankfully though, this time I had companions who could tank and DPS for me, and I rarely felt out of my depth going this route. Indeed the only time I felt out of my depth was when they decided to invoke a plot twist that removed the tank companion I had been gearing up all through the previous planet (and my other tank companion had been woefully under-geared since I picked her up). Gold enemies tore through my DPS companion like he was thin paper and I had to take them down the good old fashioned Stranglethorn Vale way. Hit, Hide and Heal.

Perhaps in a stroke of foresight by Bioware, my primary Healing stat also improves my DPS, unlike in Vanilla WoW where Intellect and spirit were as useless in cat form as Strength and Agility were to healing, and the Balance skills were the equivalent of paper spitballs and twanging them with a ruler.

Yes, I chose to level as a healer knowing my potential fate for one good reason. If I could come out of 50 levels of gameplay as a healer and still say I had fun, I’d know this was a good game.

I did the same for City of Heroes, I did the same for Champions Online, I did the same for Star Trek Online. Only WoW and CoH made me want to gouge my eyes out for choosing the support route while levelling. Luckilly for CoH I could get a group anywhere, any time. Unfortunately for CoH I spent most of that grinding an instance in a way known as ‘Drecking’. Which is ironic since the one thing you didn’t do when Drecking was kill Dreck.

So, did I have fun in SWTOR? Yes. I had fun. Most of the time. The companion mechanics let me choose to shore up the areas I was lacking in, allowing me to focus on doing what I did best, healing my companion, stealthing around and generally avoiding fights.

That last point is a bone of contention too. With such a stealthy class as the Operative, being able to crowd control and sneak past without fighting I missed out in about 50% of the XP when levelling. This was incredibly apparent when a friend of mine, who is currently a level 49 Bounty Hunter, said he had just finished Hoth, when I, at level 48, had just completed Corellia. I was 4 planets ahead of him and 1 level behind. I’d finished my class quest (and got my tank back). I had even spent a full 2 hours playing the (rather fun considering) Space combat minigame and pulled back a full level. (Possibly only JUST bearable due to the ‘2 hours of awesome’ playlist I compiled beforehand). I felt like I was being punished for playing my character as intended.

Aside from falling behind the levelling curve – and lets be honest here I never actually came across a fight I couldn’t take, even being 2 levels behind intended – there are still a few niggles that keep me from falling deeply in love with this game.

The first is the incredible similarity to WoW. As you may have guessed already I’ve played this game in such a way as to be able to directly compare it to my WoW experiences. I chose the Operative class which is most like my Primary WoW Class – Druid. I chose Medic to go along with a talent tree I knew beforehand it had similarities to – Resto. I chose Biochem as my crafting profession since I knew it’d be like Alchemy. I chose Empire since it was most like the Horde. I even joined my old WoW guild as they started over in SWTOR.

I have a list the length of my body of direct comparisons and direct similarities. Some of which I will share.

First off is Crafting. It’s almost a direct copy of WoW’s crafting system with a little bit of Fallen Earth in there too. Thanks to companions doing all the legwork you don’t actually have to stand there and watch a progress bar. This frees you up to do other things while crafting is going on (like levelling, or flashpoints, or play the Auction House), and also allowed Bioware to up the crafting times. I’ve got recipes that take up to an hour to complete (the little dash of Fallen Earth I mentioned). They’ve also taken WoW’s recipe discovery mechanics and made it make alot more sense. You get a chance to discover a better quality recipe of an item when you reverse engineer it (Reverse Engineering is kind of like disenchanting in WoW, you get some of your ingredients back and lose the item). Frankly it’s a lot better than WoW’s way of discovering new recipes, it makes you feel like your character is actually discovering them rather than transmuting fire and learning to make a super-flask-of-awesome.

There’s also similarities in what you can craft. Biochem makes stims that are effectively the same as WoW’s flasks, plus you can also discover recipes for Biochem-only reusable version like WoW’s Alchemy-only mini-flasks or reuseable potions.

End-game Gear is also split into tiers, for which you receive tokens from Operations and Flashpoints (Raids and Heroics in WoW parlance), the difference here is that all the stats in the majority of pieces are ‘modifications’ which can be swapped out (for a price) and put in any other piece of gear with mod slots, meaning you don’t have to become a clone of every other level 50 Agent/Sith/Jedi/Trooper etc as you get better gear.

It also means that you can, potentially, have a level 50 epic tanking set that’s actually the Slave Girl Costume from Return of the Jedi. Granted, WoW has just added something similar in, and pretty much every MMO released in the last three years has something similar, even if it’s only changing the colour.

Operative Class abilities are also eerily similar to that of a rogue. Stealth, Ambush, Cheap Shot, backstab, sinister strike, Vanish. All there albeit with different names. Add onto that a smattering of ranged abilities that mirror WoW’s Hunter, and a similar story for druid healing abilities and you’ve got a class that’s going to be very, very, versatile when dual-specing is added.

Healing as an operative, while superficially similar to that of a WoW Druid, is nothing like it at all. While you do have yourself a slow, big heal (like Healing Touch), a Player-based AoE HoT (like Wild Growth, that’s also the end of tree Talent) and a stackable fast HoT (like rejuvenation) and an instant, buff consuming, low-cost heal (like swiftmend) there few but crucial differences. Mainly the “Tactical Advantage” buff. The big heal, Kolto Injection, gives you this TA buff. Random ticks of Kolto Probe (the stackable HoT) also give TA with talents. Tactical Advantage allows a selection of other abilities to be used. One is a quick, medium heal that consumes a TA (like Regrowth without the HoT), the other is an instant heal that also consumes a TA (like Swiftmend). However, with talents, if the target is under a certain health threshold your cheap and powerful Swiftmend-alike doesn’t consume the TA buff, allowing you to spam it. This means that the most energy efficient way of healing a tank thats being pounded is to keep them under 30% HP.

Which is fun.

I’ve already gushed about how great the story is, but playing as a light-side Empire I fully expected to find some strange and awkward gaps where the Light Side choice didn’t make any sense, or should have rightly gotten me killed by whoever I said it to.

Thank god Bioware knew this. I got zapped by about 3 or 4 Sith Lords through my playthrough. One of which ACTUALLY killed me and sent me to the Medical Droid. As you progressed through the story you gain more and more influence, so the underlings requesting your assistance – while questioning your decision – can’t actually do anything about it because they know you have the power and fear you.

Lightside Empire isn’t all goodie-two-shoes though. Most Light Side choices are pragmatic or bureaucratic as opposed to evil. Bioware spend alot of time distancing the Sith from the Empire conceptually, so that an Empire Patriot can still loathe and despise the Sith. Despite this, it does occasionally fall into what Dungeons and Dragons players call “Lawful-Stupid” territory. Whereby the Light side choice is quite obviously a dangerous, stupid and frankly idiotic choice. At the end of Directive 7 flashpoint (minor spoiler here) there’s a droid who help you, who, during the instance has basically said he agrees that Organic Life is a menace, but doesn’t believe genocide is the answer to it, and you have the choice to destroy him or let him go. I’ve read enough Asimov to know that a determined sentient robot with an agenda can manipulate the galaxy, even if it’s a pacifist, but as a “Light V one-dark-side-choice-and-lose-your-title-and-speeder” character I had no choice but to let him go.

If anything destroying him should have been light side, and making him a slave by sticking a restraining bolt in should be dark side.

Darkside and Lightside choices often fall into a false Dichotomy, and I can nearly always see a third way out to all of these situations, but the options just aren’t there.  Where there are three options, it’s normally 2 light, 1 dark, or 2 dark, 1 light. A few times there’s an option without a score change, but – while they have promised it – there are no rewards for Neutral players yet.

The comparisons to WoW will remain in the game mechanics. When it comes to story though, SWTOR is lightyears ahead of anything else. It’s what Bioware does best, and they live up to their standards here.

If you loved KOTOR, give SWTOR a try, even if you turn off chat, play the Jedi Knight and pretend it’s KOTOR 3. It’s worth it.

[SWTOR] The First Fortnight

The Light-Side Agent

Merry Christmas everyone! Or should that be Happy Life Day? Curiously, SWTOR seems to lack seasonal events. Perhaps it’s the terrible memories it brings back for those old enough, or curious enough, to have watched even a moment of the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Before I Go any further, I must declare my love for this game. I have reached the end of Act 1 in my Class Quest – the Imperial Agent – and once again Bioware have shown that if anything, they are masters of storytelling. They are the geniuses who twist and weave stories using the most trite and over-used clichés known to modern culture into something plainly awesome. Through clever use of foreshadowing no single twist seems like an arse-pull or out of the blue, even if you predict one twist you probably won’t guess every detail. Unlike the latest revelations in a certain other game that make me glad I’m no longer playing it.

So far everything else has been merely a subtle refinement of the MMO Genre from WoW. Subtly tweaking, changing or removing things. The storyline however is unlike anything seen in MMOs ever. The way it’s presented, the way it flows, the way you feel like you’re actually making a difference. It’s also hard at the current moment to know if you’re making a difference though, since sites like TorHead are incomplete in their quest descriptions, you don’t actually know what would happen if you chose option B over option A once the conversation is over, and how it actually affects the later plotline. For now however, it does feel like you’ve made real choices. Even if the same outcome would have happened regardless, you still get to make moral choices that affect alignment, and non-moral choices that let you refine your character and gain affection from your companions.

Someone's been watching Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles too much

The game so far has been far from bug-free, but I’ve come across only one game-breaking bug, flickering terrain, and it can be fixed by a re-log. (although, that’s hardly fair with the length of queues on my server). Most problems are cosmetic, or crafting/vendor related. Nothing that stops you progressing. One bug I found was commendations received through the mail system don’t go into your currency tab, but are physical items taking up space. I’ve only gotten 2 so it’s not a big deal. A few times I’ve had enemies embed themselves in walls, continue to shoot me but be completely invulnerable. Running round a corner forces them out, but it’s still frustrating, and if there’s no Line-of-sight cover then you’re screwed unless you can get out of range without pulling something else.

As mentioned above queues were abundant. Between 5pm and 9pm GMT my server had queues upwards of an hour. They’ve gotten better recently since they’ve upped the server cap, or people have decide to move server, and I’ve not had to queue for the last couple of days. Plus, out of about 200 servers there’s only about 12 with any queues at all, and I was just unlucky that every Tom Dick and Chewie picked my server.

Mechanically the game is sound. Familiar certainly. Balanced? Well, professions seem to be okay, except slicing which is guaranteed money (but has been nerfed in todays patch). Class wise I’m unsure. I’ve yet to try and PvP, and it’s too early to tell if one class is more powerful than the other (the meta-game has not gotten into full swing yet) though playing as an Imperial agent it does feel like I have a shittonne of tools that you wouldn’t expect a single class to have.

Firstly, I’ve gone Operative, which gains stealth and focuses on mid-ranged damage dealing. I’ve started levelling up as a Medic, one of the core healing trees in the game, just so I can compare to levelling as a Resto Druid at the start of Vanilla WoW. Yes, I did that, I spent 20 minutes soloing the 30 Elite Bhagthera in Stranglethorn Vale using auto attack and heals. Let me tell you now, SWTOR is nothing like that.

Like the Resto Druid I have both healing and stealth, and a little ranged damage. A very hybrid class at it’s core. Pile on top of this everything a rogue gets in WoW and more. Vanish, Sap, Evasion, a Threat Dump, a variation on cheap shot, an AoE stun, a frontal-cone ranged attack, ranged poison DoT. Okay, my damage output is terrible compared to someone who took one of the other two trees, and their healing output will suffer, but a stealthed, stun-crazy, DoTing, fast healer has to have some kind of balance issue.

I mentioned crafting being balanced earlier and I definitely believe that to be true. Everyone I’ve talked to has said they’ve been able to find something in their chosen profession that they’ve been able to sell to other players.

Giant flying space whales > Hippogriffs

I picked Biochem, and again with the WoW analogies, it’s like Alchemy.  I make stims (Potions) and implants (trinkets). Instead of discovering potions and flasks like WoW tried, you reverse-engineer items (think disenchanting) to regain some of the materials you used to make it, and you then get a random chance of learning an improved version of it. Also, each item takes various amounts of time to make, my longest crafting recipe so far takes about 8 minutes/item. Luckily you can just tell a free companion to make it while you continue to play. So you don’t actually need to stop playing to go crafting.

I can definitely recommend this game to friends. Even if it’s just for the storyline. It’s still too early to tell if the end-game team dynamics will work, but so far my group experiences have been fun. I can only hope that the group conversation options don’t affect which boss you spawn, otherwise you’ll get guilds forcing republic players to choose Dark Side options just to spawn a boss that’s slightly easier, or bugged, or whatever.

We know Bioware can do story, but can they do balance?