First, the Games for Windows Live logo was spotted on the art for the PC Edition. This caused quite a stir, as the Games for Windows Live matchmaking tends to be pretty bad, and there’s always authorization-related issues with GFWL games. Another major failure of GFWL is that the games aren’t allowed to be sold in some regions, so gamers are highly inconvenienced and often turn to piracy to overcome such restrictions. All in all though, GFWL was largely to be expected because it makes a port over from the Xbox 360 incredibly easy and doesn’t cost many resources.

There was then outcry about that, begging Namco and From Software to reconsider the multiplayer/DRM platform. They have stated that options are in discussion and we could potentially see something else used. Another victory for the PC gamers. Then more bad news came.

Yesterday, in an interview with a developer at From Software, it was revealed that mouse and keyboard support would be extremely limited and they expect you to still use a gamepad to play it, there would be no increase in resolution of the textures, and it will remain locked at thirty frames per second. Once again, and rightfully so, there is outcry. There’s no point in doing it, if you’re not going to do it right.

It isn’t terribly surprising that keyboard and mouse support will be bad, as Japanese game developers have proven time and time again over the last two decades that they’re out of touch with PC as a gaming platform. There’s a significant cultural barrier there, where almost unanimously games are played with controllers even on the PC platform. This is most notably seen in the MMO space with games like FFXI, FFXIV, and Monster Hunter Frontier. However, I own Dark Souls on the Xbox 360, as do many PC gamers interested in having it on the PC. If I wanted to play it with a controller, I could do that already. Gamepads have grown increasingly less comfortable for me over the years, and I just hate using them.

The lack of high resolution textures is also greatly disappointing. The Xbox 360 is six and a half years old, and the hardware inside it is even older. It’s absolutely ancient by PC gamer standards. Therefore, realistically styled games on it also tend to look tragically bad. It would have been nice to see Dark Souls in beautiful HD (sorry, 1280×720 just isn’t HD anymore. 1280×720 on ancient hardware is even less HD), but I suppose we’ll live.

Finally, we have the frame rate lock. There’s just no reason to do this. There isn’t a gamer out there, who is capable of perceiving greater than thirty frames per second, that isn’t annoyed by this. For PC gamers, that’s a whole hell of a lot of us. There’s also a lot of 120Hz monitors out there now, and thirty FPS is even more jarring on them that it is on 60Hz monitors. Just don’t do it.

Hopefully some or all of these issues can be resolved. I’m really concerned at this point for how the whole affair is going to turn out. They’re heading in a direction where they’re going to see a LOT less sales than we suggested they’d see with the petition. The PC as of late has had an oddly difficult time getting real game support as well, and further damaging that would be problematic.

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On the flip side, we have CD Projekt Red, out of Poland, who deserves some praise. The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings (Enhanced Edition) came out this week for Xbox 360 (and free content upgrade for PC gamers who own it) and it’s exceptionally well done. They properly adapted the control scheme to the platform (because it was a real PC interface *gasp*), and the game is still gorgeous. The Witcher 2 looks better than the vast majority of games on Xbox 360, which is particularly impressive given the fact that it is CD Projekt Red’s first console game. Of course it’s not as good looking as the PC version (especially in the area of lighting) but I bet you can guess why.

Keep on keeping on CD Projekt Red, you guys are great.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning had a LOT of hype going into it, mostly driven by the big names working on the project. Curt Schilling of baseball fame had started a game development studio, and recruited the likes of R.A. Salvatore (22 NYTimes best sellers), Todd McFarlane (artist behind Spawn), and Ken Rolston (Paranoia, Morrowind, Oblivion). With such powerhouse team leaders, great things were certainly expected.

During the launch of Reckoning, Sean “Day[9]” Plott of Starcraft fame hosted an all-day stream-a-thon with many internet personalities participating. Throughout the course of this event, he also had interviews with Curt Schilling, Todd McFarlane, R.A. Salvatore, and Ken Rolston, the three most interesting of which (due to their actual involvement with the game) I have linked. To hear these men talk about the game and their ambitions with it, you can’t help but feel inspired. I strongly recommend you check out the interviews, as well as to a lesser extent this episode of Feedback via g4tv.com which features Ken Rolston again, as well as their lead combat guy Joe Quadara. Understanding the passion and attitude (and moderate level of douchiness in regards to Ken Rolston) of these developers will make my forthcoming words that much harsher.

With so much of what was promised in Reckoning, and all of the big ideas the team has, so little of it shines through. It’s a lot to discuss, so I guess I’ll go through in order of what is least broken.

Combat and enemy animations and sound are impeccable. Everything, while exaggerated, FEELS right. Everything has the weight behind it that you would expect, and combat just flows so very smoothly. Todd really did a great job when it comes to combat, so much of what he was talking about in the interview with Day[9] was readily evident in the game. It seems, however, that the team completely forgot to apply those concepts outside of combat. Non-combat NPCs feel empty, patrol routes for guards are completely rigid and standard, and most notably the weak animations during conversation are a jarringly stark contrast to the flourishing grandeur of combat. To top off the weak NPC animations, they also all have REALLY creepy eyeball animations.

Being an RPG, there is of course a focus on story; why else would you need a writer such as R.A. Salvatore involved? For all his talks about how important a deep and populated world is, the entire story of Reckoning feels so hollow. Reckoning does an exceptionally bad job at encouraging you to care about anything at all the denizens have to say. The overarching story is told poorly; there’s no driving force encouraging you on, there’s no sense of urgency, and there’s no consequence to action.

Reckoning also commits one of the biggest sins an RPG can. Throughout the entire game, quests are structured in such a way that the game expects you to do them simply because they exist and it’s a game and you’re playing it so you’re going to want to do stuff. There’s no reason for you to help any given NPC, there’s very rarely any talk of compensation for your adventuring services, it just assumes you want to help some random gnome with her business dealings. It doesn’t even give you a reason to care about anyone’s situation, or a reason as to why you’re the one fit for the job. Many of the quest lines shouldn’t even be information that’s available to the public, problems involving high ranking political figures and the like. For all the talk of how the player has to be the most important character, no one in the world except the main bad guy (who you don’t even know knows who you are…) even cares about your status.

The next topic for discussion is the interface, and allow me to preface this as coming from a PC gamer perspective. We were assured time and time again that they had guys working specifically on the PC interface, and that we would find it meets our expectations and would not be a bad a console port. Well, it is a bad console port.

First and foremost in the category of interface issues is the camera. Reckoning is a third person game, but they somehow managed to make it feel just as bad as playing a first person game with a super-low FoV because of how close the camera is to your character at all times. Additionally, the camera is centered on the small of your character’s back, rather than the head, meaning that your character takes up a significant amount of screen space. Finally, being clearly developed as a console game, camera control in combat is terrible and largely uncontrollable. The game tries to automatically frame everything, and often fails at it, resulting in you often trying unsuccessfully to fight enemies that are off screen.

The console influence is also greatly seen in the available weapons and abilities options. Despite actually having a “Universalist” class that is skilled in ALL weapons, you are limited to having two weapons equipped at a time which you can hot swap between. If you want to use any additional weapons for any reason, you have to go through the menus to equip them which is a long and tedious process, effectively limiting you to only two weapons available. This is a concept that was largely introduced when shooter games made the transition to consoles, after games such as Unreal Tournament and Quake fell out of popularity.

The equipped abilities are also limited to eight slots, despite being able to acquire more than eight at a given time (especially if playing a Universalist), though this is a noted increase from the console version limitation of four. The console influence also shines through in the execution of your abilities. In most PC RPGs, you assign an ability to a button, you press the button, and it executes the ability. In reckoning, you must press the button to select the ability you want to use (by default, keys 1-8) and then execute it with right-click. This creates extra keystrokes for no benefit and hinders the fluidity of combat to a degree.

Continuing with issues inherited from console games, you must go through the menu system to discover what the buffs and debuffs on you are, which is something other bad console ports have issues with as well (Skyrim). Additionally, quest tracking for indicating on the map where quests are located is limited to only tracking one quest at a time, resulting in yet more menu navigating.

Finally, we come to the core menu structure. Everything is laid out in a scrolling list format like you’re supposed to navigate it with a console controller. The inventory in particular has a lot of right-click context menus for actions that could be performed with a single click or button press. You can right-click items to add them to junk and then do “sell all junk” at a vendor, but the process of junking things actually takes longer than individually selling your vendor trash. There’s also far too many sub-menus for equipment and the like, something that in PC gaming is traditionally dealt with via a paper doll setup.

The crafting menus are painfully obviously designed for use with a clunky console controller, as navigating them with a mouse takes an unnecessary amount of time and extra clicks and extra screens you need to view. Perhaps one of my largest complaints as well is with the Sagecrafting interface, where there are only ten types of shards in existence in the game, but the interface for displaying them is limited to nine, resulting in more scrolling.

Last but certainly not least, we come down to issues in design, mechanics, and balance. It is in this area we can see a lot of Ken Rolston and his flawed ideas shine through, and that’s not a good thing. The Elder Scrolls games have never been mechanically strong.

There are some core passive abilities in the game that are simply not optional, and the way in which they work actually makes exploration significantly less meaningful. The primary example of this is the Detect Hidden skill. Detect Hidden, when leveled up with the skill points you gain each level, will reveal on your minimap the location of treasure. This is an arguable drawback, until you get a few more points into Detect Hidden at which point it starts showing you hidden treasure caches and hidden doors. The problem with this is that you cannot interact with the hidden treasure caches or hidden doors at all unless you have Detect Hidden to the appropriate rank. So they’re not so much hidden and hard to find as they are effectively non-existent to a character without Detect Hidden.

The game is also plagued with one of the worst level scaling systems I’ve seen in an open-world style game. There have always been issues with level scaling in open world games, particularly in the Elder Scrolls franchise. Reckoning approaches the issue by locking a region (with a restriction on minimum and maximum level the region can be) the first time you enter it. Therefore, if you’re like most people playing an open world game and you’re exploring, you can tend to seriously fuck up your level curve and end up fighting a lot of severely under-leveled enemies later on. This is made worse by the fact that some of the areas which trigger the level lock on a region are kind of wonky. Such as there being hidden treasure chests or doorways (that you find with your trusty Detect Hidden skill!) being in the pathway between two regions, and you inadvertently lock a region without actually traveling into it.

Then we have Reckoning mode, the game’s signature “Hey, you’re a badass” feature. Entering Reckoning mode requires that you build up “fate” by killing enemies, which you can then unleash to slow time, increase damage substantially, and perform finishing moves. It’s blatantly overpowered by design. Engaging Reckoning mode will, unless you’re absolutely AWFUL at the game, guaranteed kill any group of enemies you use it on. The big problem with this comes in with the rate at which you build it being too high, and the fact it works on bosses. 95% of the boss fights in Reckoning for me were reduced to “Oh hey a boss” followed by turning on Reckoning and being done with the fight 5 seconds later.

As is also a problem in the Elder Scrolls series, potions and other crafting is largely unregulated and completely out of balance. There’s no cooldown or reduced effect on chugging multiple health potions in Reckoning, making you essentially invincible. As for crafted gear, it is also some of the best in the game and obtainable at much earlier levels than you would see that power on found loot, due to the way the skill point system works.

Skill balance is also completely out of whack, with certain skills basically annihilating everything, and several skills being completely useless as to question why they even exist.

These things all lead into player power completely overwhelming the environment’s power, resulting in a tragically easy game. On hard mode we’re talking to the level of it being easier than WoW normal dungeons. That is all magnitudes of bad. Hard mode Reckoning is somewhere between let’s say…Lego Star Wars/Indiana Jones/Batman/Harry Potter/etc and WoW normal mode. Just…ugh.

This is further reinforced by TERRIBLE design of some bosses (you know, the ones you can’t just pop Reckoning mode on and win instantly). There’s a major story boss about 2/3 through the game. You’re defending a city from a massive siege by the enemy army, and it’s like Helm’s Deep out there. So you’re fighting your way through this mess of a siege, and they have this giant cyclops slug guy with fucking eye lasers, and this creature is a major key component of their siege. So key, that when you kill it, it’s time for a full out retreat by the enemy army. The fights leading up to the boss are some of the hardest the game has to offer (which is still nothing with some light potion use), and you finally get up to the boss and what does your epic battle turn out to be? That’s right, it’s an EASIER version of the TUTORIAL boss in Darksiders. My fucking boss 2/3 through the game on HARD is an easier version of a TUTORIAL boss!? You have to be shitting me.

All in all, I died a grand total of once on Hard in Reckoning, and that was because I botched disarming a particularly nasty trap. The most dangerous enemies in the entire game are your typical everyday wolves when paired with anything else at all. That’s kind of sad.

After the release of the game and in response to this sort of criticism from the players (not the press who largely gave it 9/10 and 10/10, with the exception of G4TV’s Adam Sessler who told it like it is), particularly camera issues and difficulty, Curt Schilling made several posts talking about how they’re taking our feedback and they would like to patch the game to address concerns. He also stated that it may take a little while because the team needed some much deserved R&R, as well as the various approval processes involved with Xbox, PS3, Steam, Origin, etc that would need to be handled to make the patch happen. With this I decided I would wait to re-address the game until after the patch, and hopefully get more enjoyment out of it.

Fast forward now two and a half months, on the day of the announcement of the second DLC content release for Reckoning, I decided to see what was up with the patch. Obviously, releasing not only one but now two content patches, they had that whole approval process sorted out. This is what Curt Schilling had to say:

Man, I am unsure how people can get the perspective of us not being engaged with you guys. We have been, we will be.

I am also unsure of how many more times we can tell you that we are NOT in control of patching, with regards to timing, on any platform but the PC, and even then it’s not that clear cut.

EA has complete control over content released for Reckoning, from the first two DLCs to patching. After them it’s the console manufacturers who have the final word and authority.

No matter WHAT we WANT to do, there is almost nothing we are ALLOWED to do without permission from 1 or more parties, that and a pretty large check as well.

The legalities and the hows and whys are obviously not something that can be made public, but I hope you guys understand this is not something we are in control of.

The other enormous and very valid fear is breaking the game we launched. Given the insanely low volume of game breaking bugs (of which I, as a player, agree that 1 is too many) we have to be incredibly careful with any patch to insure we do NOT break the game we launched. If you look at some other games that have patched their post launch code you will see MANY instances of patches following patches, to fix bugs introduced by patches, that didn’t exist in the launched product.

With the rare exception over 98% of our players are playing Reckoning to completion with few to no bugs, and no game breaking ones, and ANY patch puts the original game code at risk.

Yes we do want a hard core mode, yes we do want to fix the few reproduce-able main quest bugs we have found, but not at the expense of breaking anything else.

That means LARGE QA effort in time, money and teams. We do not have an internal QA team nearly large enough to push this, so we’d need co-operation from someone not named 38 to get that done. We will not receive that as things stand right now. That means we have to keep pushing and looking for help to get it done, and we are.

Why does EA have control over the content in your game? Why in the hell would you sign that? Why in all of hell are you afraid of patching? That’s like being afraid to write the game in the first place. Any and all game-breaking bugs MUST be addressed, that’s just how making fit-for-purpose products is. It has to work, you don’t have a CHOICE. Your programmers should know what changes could possibly affect what, which also significantly restricts the amount of QA you have to do. Push come to shove, you could fucking beta a patch and your consumers will do your QA work for you, and happily at that. Let’s not forget the most important and obvious part, though, where you’ve released two content patches in the form of DLC. This changes the code and requires QA. What the fuck are you talking about?

So in conclusion, Reckoning is a disappointment, and a solid 5/10 if you like easy games and you want to play it with a gamepad. It’s not a bad game, but it’s certainly not a good game.

P.S.: For some reason, as with Elder Scrolls and Fallout and the like, every NPC in the world knows which items are stolen. Fuck you, Ken Rolston.

For quite a few years now (probably the time frame between Final Fantasy 7 and until recently when we’ve been seeing a resurgence in desire for JRPGs) JRPGs have been approached with great disdain by the Western culture (and is the reason we don’t get very many of them translated and sold to us). WRPGs have long been about implicit storytelling. Why write three pages of dialog when claw marks tell the tale just as well? It works because we naturally form stories about the world around us, virtual or otherwise. A great example of that is Devil’s Tower here in Wyoming.

So be it much to my surprise all the fuss about the ending of Mass Effect 3, with the primary concern (and the one being addressed by Bioware with the new Extended Cut) that there’s no closure on the effects your actions had and how your crew ends up. I don’t need the game to tell me that the Krogan are REALLY FUCKED because of what I did and how things ended up concluding, it’s quite obvious what’s going to happen in that situation. I don’t need to be told how Garrus lives out the rest of his days, I *know* that character by the end, and can make a really solid educated guess.

The whole situation is quite odd to me, these demands of the developer for an explicit ending for every character or group or people you could remotely care about. Again, citing Dark Souls, that is a true WRPG (even though it’s made in Japan). There is absolutely zero explicit storytelling in that game, at least so far (I’m like 20 hours or so in), but the world itself speaks volumes, and it is richer for it.

This of course is not to say that there’s anything wrong with explicit storytelling, I mean it’s the basis of so much of our media. In a medium where you can so easily show without telling, and do so to great effect, it’s so very odd when people get up in arms about it.

EDIT: How convenient. This was posted shortly before I wrote this: BBB concludes BioWare “falsely advertised”

In a world of dragons and gods and other such magical beings, are there artifacts to be discovered that shatter the the chains that restrain us? In games of old, the answer is surprisingly often yes. Searching for such objects and secrets of power added more fuel to the fire of our exploration of our worlds. Great adventures were had for many, seeking power, drinking in majesty, dying multitudes of deaths in the depths of some catacombs no players had ever set foot in.

Fast forward a few years, and it seems as if so much of gaming has been reduced to following orders and not exploring anything at all. What rules we once tried to break have now consumed us, with games telling us what to do every moment we’re in their worlds. World of Warcraft is of course an easy target, but it is also a great example, as they took the idea and ran with it and made a fuckton of money in the process.

In World of Warcraft and a slew of other RPGs made in the last 7 years, if you’re not going from one quest giver with a giant exclamation mark above his head to another, you’re not progressing at all. This means that if you don’t have a quest to go someplace, you almost never actually go there. This also means that, because developers that like to make money have to manage their resources well, means that there is largely nothing to be found in any place that doesn’t have a quest attached to it. Combine the quest-centric gameplay with the fact that quest givers have a giant fucking exclamation mark on their head which also shows on your handy-dandy map every time you’re in the remote vicinity of a quest giver, exploration is severely limited.

This has been an ongoing trend in the last several years. As much as I have issues with so much of Skyrim and Elder Scrolls games in general, one thing they do exceptionally well is just NPC chatter as you’re passing by. Some chick fretting about a bard harassing her, and you go about your business or you stop and offer your help. She doesn’t need a giant fucking exclamation mark you can see from 4 miles away, and because the range is more limited you wander about eavesdropping a bit if you’re the help-random-people kind of adventurer.

I’m pretty sure I’m rapidly losing my point here, so this is it: when I see shit like the sheer frequency the question “Where do I go after killing the bandit lords?” is asked in the Path of Exile global chat, I cry a little bit inside for the state of games in general at the moment. Oh I don’t know, maybe you should LOOK AT YOUR FUCKING MAP and check the areas you haven’t been in (the ones with the fucking question marks) for the answer!? When you’re to that point, you’ve just collected the amulets from 3 bandit lords, which forms into a mysterious object. It couldn’t POSSIBLY have a use besides taking up inventory space, oh no. My EQ1 bank is *still* completely FULL of “something” items. I don’t have the slightest idea what the vast majority of them do, but goddammit they fucking do something, somewhere.

EQ1 is a great example of the opposite. The devs even said recently(ish) that there’s still several quests that now 13 years later, no one has completed. That’s impressive, in a game that so strongly encourages exploration.

Dark Souls is another great example of exploration. After you exit the tutorial area (which is still hugely about exploration), you’re carried by a giant bird to a small camp in the middle of some ruins on a hill. There’s nothing there, except a firekeeper fellow who greets you kindly, and the only guidance he has to offer is a rumor about ringing some bells. He tells you that there is one bell above your current location, and one below, and that’s it. He doesn’t need to tell you that there’s some stairs over yonder that should be a good place to go. He doesn’t even give a shit what you do, and why should he? You’re alone and forsaken, you have no idea what’s going on, you don’t know who or where you are, but what are you going to do, sit around a mope? Fuck no, you’re going to look around because moping is boring. So your adventure begins.

I’d like to state for the record that I also went everywhere EXCEPT the easiest place in the game (starter area), and died many a death, and enjoyed every minute of it. I’d periodically be like “Oh hey, I’m getting my ass kicked well…maybe I’ll look around for another place to go.” and do so, and I can’t count how many times I missed that staircase leading to the newbie area.

So I guess the point is, can we stop it with the fucking exclamation points and get some exploration up in here again?

The game’s story, as with its predecessors, is well told and thoroughly draws you in. Though you’re out saving the world/galaxy/etc yet again, as you are in oh so many games, there continues to be a great deal of substance to the Mass Effect universe. With Mass Effect 3, Bioware has also made significant strides in having their moral choice systems not be so abhorrently black & white. All you have to deal with throughout your journey in Mass Effect 3 is lots and lots of gray; your moral choices are often a decision between bad and worse. You will likely feel a bit of guilt, and you will definitely have blood on your hands by the end of it.

There are certainly some issues with the story that I found, however. The dream sequences that haunt Shepard periodically feel incredibly out of place and feel like they detract from the story, especially if you’re a long-term veteran of the series. Additionally, there are some psuedo-mechanical failures in the story if you don’t import your saved game files from ME1/ME2, such as several characters which are not optional characters in the previous game’s storylines, don’t seem to recognize you at all.

Perhaps the biggest issue with the mechanical side of not importing your save games, however, is a situation that hit pretty close to home for me. I did not finish Mass Effect 1, as several of the mechanics in that game are brutally bad. So when I started my game anew in Mass Effect 2, I was matter-of-factly informed that a specific character died as a result of an order given by Shepard in Mass Effect 1. At the time I just rolled with it, sad at the loss, but things are how they are I guess. Upon starting a new game again in Mass Effect 3 (who keeps their save files anyway, wtf), I was shocked to learn that who you give the “yeah you’re going to die, but you gota do this” order to is a choice the player makes. The option to later retroactively make this choice during character creation in Mass Effect 3 essentially means I just brought a character back from the dead and instead killed off one I didn’t like very much. By far the biggest issue with this, however, is that they repeat the VERY SAME PROBLEM in Mass Effect 3! They go on to *assume* that you did action A in Mass Effect 2, when you very well could have done B, and they don’t bother asking you about it.

Putting aside the story and the great experience it provides despite its flaws, we of course have to acknowledge that games are not all story. Games aren’t movies, after all, no matter how much Square-Enix might think they are. There are some areas in gameplay where Mass Effect 3 falls annoying flat. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that none of these are issues in Mass Effect 2, so in regards to these issues, Mass Effect 3 is actually a step backwards. List form is probably most effective:

• Ammo availability at the start of the game is radically different than later on in the game, leading to a very rocky start at the higher difficulties which gets significantly easier later on in the game.
• I got stuck (as in glued to the floor) not once, but twice, on the bridge of my own ship while talking to my pilot. You’d think that’d be something caught in QA if I ran into twice during a normal playthrough…
• Squad member AI, especially that of the soldier persuasion, is TERRIBLE. Like back to ME1 terrible. ME2 squad members helped out and pretty much took care of themselves. ME3 squad members that don’t have powers are completely useless. I had to bench my normal right-hand man Garrus for this very reason.
• There’s some issues with conversations not properly checking against what Shepard already knows, resulting in characters revealing “secrets” that surprise Shepard even though she’s known for hours…
• The planet scanning interface is largely inconsistent with regards to what systems have objects obtainable via scanning, and which don’t.
• The planet scanning system continues to be entirely too “gamey”, which is
  a theme that runs throughout the entire trilogy, throughout all it’s various forms.
• You don’t have an “inventory” or a key items list or anything to let you know what artifacts you have, and side-quest text doesn’t update upon acquiring relevant items, so it is often difficult to tell whether you have the item required to complete a quest or not. Unless you pay super close attention, or keep notes, or have a crazy good memory.
• The spacebar does ENTIRELY too much. It is sprint, take cover, leave cover, roll cover-to-cover, and interact/use. This causes all sorts of problems getting Shepard to do what you want in combat. You end up fighting this system throughout the entire game, and racking up a lot of stupid deaths because of it.
• You don’t have to enter a seperate command (such as spacebar…) in order to move between connecting cover facing different directions, such as perpendicular walls. In combat situations, this often leads to unexpected camera rotations, as well as getting shot in the face and dying.
• Despite being the highest rank of human special forces, and an all around badass, as well as being able to do it in Mass Effect 2 (if I recall correctly), Shepard somehow isn’t good enough to not interrupt reloading her gun when she sprints, enters cover, exits cover, or tumbles. Tumbling I can maybe see, but everything else? Furthermore, this becomes a huge gameplay issue, especially if you’re something that uses limited rounds (a sniper) between reloads, as the vast majority of the badies in Mass Effect 3 like to throw grenades at you, which will instant kill you if you don’t move. I died more than a handful of times to this issue, after dodging a grenade, being ready to make a tight shot, and then finding I had no bullet in the chamber.
• Bioware had also stated that you would be able to achieve the “best” endings without participating in the multiplayer component of the game. This seems to be completely false, as endings go all the way up to 5000+ “readiness rating”, and I only scored 2786 with completing all quests, and as far as I can tell, finding all collectables (5572 base rating * 50% “readiness” which can only be adjusted via multiplayer).

An additional note is that except for a dry spell in Act 2, the Insanity difficulty brought the heat and was very enjoyable for an experienced gamer such as myself. That seems to be a rarity these days.

In conclusion, Mass Effect 3 — and the series as a whole — is well worth your time. Your reaction to any and all story elements will differ greatly, as Mass Effect is a remarkably personal story based on your choices, but it is an experience that I recommend. Do be aware though, that through both ME1 and ME3, you will find yourself fighting game mechanics the entire way.

Farewell, Shepard. We’ve been through a lot.

Well I get there tonight, around dead center in their restocking time so the place is usually sporting quite a few workers, but all I see is construction people. I see a guy walking out with a small plastic bag of goods as I’m walking in, so I figure eh, it’s all good. It raises an eyebrow though as when I enter, there aren’t any open lanes and all the self checkout machines are turned off.

Regardless, I continue on with my trusty basket in hand, it’s time to get some delicious game development crunch time snacks! I was figuring on some turkey jerky with maybe some pretzel sticks as a nice contrast snack, and some Simply Lemonade. Mmmm, sounds divine. So I go and collect my goods, and throughout my entire journey I see not a single King Sooper’s employee, only construction guys. Lots and lots of construction guys.

Walk down by the checkouts, no employees to be found, confirm the opposite facing row of self checkouts are also disabled. Go for a lap around the store, keeping a sharp lookout for any employees that I might question as to “what the fuck?”, and find no one. Alright, plan B I thought…I’ll wander around for a bit looking helpless and lost, and either it’ll kill enough time for someone to show up, or a security guy will come down and fill me in. Nothing happens. No store employees to be found, and thoroughly ignored by the construction guys (and rightfully so).

WTF happened with the guy exiting the store as I came in? How’d he get his stuff? Just snag some bags and throw it in there? I pondered the thought myself for some time, obviously its an abandoned storefront filled with free goods, I should just go. Just walk out with my stuff, maybe then I’d get a security guy to come and be like WTF dude. A little thieving sure was tempting.

In the end though, I decided that this morning was not the wisest time to start my life of crime, and certainly not on a whim like that. Leaving my basket of much-desired goods on a shelf under the hanging sandwich meats, I departed. So whichever employee inevitably thinks I’m a dick for abandoning my groceries, the feeling is mutual.

• The Alderaan skydome is GORGEOUS
• The voice acting is well done. (I’m looking at you, Square-Enix… *glare*)
• Force Choke is a really fun skill
• Crafting being handled largely by your NPC crew members alleviates a bunch of dreadful crafting time. If you’re not going to make a crafting system that is worth caring about (which no one has done so far), I guess this is the next best thing.

Well crap, I was sure I could come up with a couple more than that but I guess not. So since I only came up with a whopping 4 good things, I guess that means it deserves to have some more bad ones mentioned.

• Constant Crowd Control spam by the mobs, both in AE variety (affecting melee DPS and tanks) and single target (greatly affecting tanks). Tanking is, instead of mostly challenge and light frustration, just plain is infuriating.
• For some god forsaken reason you can’t put hoods down on hooded robes, and Twi’leks can’t put their hoods up, so the models for both exist but you can’t use whichever one you like.
• The Republic and Imperial Fleets (hub ‘city’ locations) are copy/paste of each other, except inverted. If you’re going to copy/paste, at least fucking copy/paste, and don’t make those of us that play both sides constantly run to the wrong place because you’re trying to make yourself feel better.
• More class design gripes: this whole subclass at level 10 thing is a bit rediculous. There’s no reason for it to even be in, and it causes problems with a lot of skills to each subclass being a “Why do I even have this POS?” type thing. And then they also like to force you into using those shitty skills by them being the only place to put your talent points.
• Raid-only lightsaber colors. Which is an especially odd design choice, seeing as how in Star Wars lore, Jedi primarily craft their lightsabers as a solo journey thing (like a vision quest or something).
• Server populations seem to cap out at a pretty low number. Servers feel kind of empty.
• With having 6 NPC crew members to also gear up, you’d think it’d be nice to add a “Need for crew member” roll option to the Need/Greed loot system. Need > Need for crew member > Greed. Not having this causes more loot arguments in groups.
• EVERYTHING in this game is a trap. Seriously. The entire game is like a giant “It’s a trap!” meme. Worst. Military. Intelligence. Ever.
• Loot is boring. 1 primary stat + endurance (health) + 2 rather dull mod2s (such as crit chance and accuracy). Set bonuses are absolutely TERRIBLE. Granted it’s been a problem being SWTOR (*cough*WoW*cough*) but unique loot is pretty much gone. Those extra little side hallways in the opposite direction of your objective? Yeah you can go there, maybe even find a named guy like you’d expect…but he’s just boring tank n’ spank, and he doesn’t drop anything. If you’re lucky, he’s guarding a security chest, wherein you’ll find more boring loot.
• No seriously…I know I said it, BUT WHY IS TRASH MORE DANGEROUS THAN FUCKING BOSSES OMG?!
• Planet control doesn’t make any fucking sense! The level 16ish Republic planet is Taris…do a lot of quests there and stuff. When you get to level 32 on Imperial, guess what your primary leveling planet is!? TARIS! But are you in a different section of Taris? Oh no. You’re in the exact same areas, but somehow all the republic influence has been pushed back to their little town and you have run of the rest of the place. It’s like Taris at a different point in time…which makes no fucking sense in an MMO. Seeing as how the entire universe exists at once…and you know…time is constant. Same thing happens in reverse as well with Balmorra.

Okay I’m done. Uninstalling now ><.

]]> http://www.theartofrandom.com/?feed=rss2&p=2179 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2172 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2172#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:30:20 +0000 Random http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2172 While I’ve sunk many hours into SWTOR thus far, the newness sheen is starting to rub off, and the core of the game has begun to really show through. Mechanically, SWTOR is disgraceful. I’d say disastrous, but it’s perhaps too strong of a word. It’ll be disastrous though if they don’t fix a lot of things very quickly.

MMOs are not a new thing anymore, we have FOURTEEN years of history at this point, even more if you count their predecessor, MUDs. This makes me wonder why we continue to see game after game released with essentially standard features missing, and SWTOR is by far one of the worst offenders of this. It’s almost like no one that makes MMOs actually plays MMOs, it’s quite bizarre.

SWTOR’s focus is bringing a new level of storytelling to MMOs, and that’s great, and executed it…somewhat alright. The problem is that they’ve essentially done *nothing* to actually progress the genre because while they’ve introduced something new and done it quite well, they’ve completely left the MMO core of the game to rust in a junkyard.

At the end of the day in an MMO, playing together and tackling challenges is core gameplay. In order for this to work, certain systems have to work together fluidly and rapidly, and be as accommodating to the now large number of lifestyles of the modern multiplayer gamer.

So while I could continue rambling on, this is the internet after all, and who doesn’t like bullet points, so let’s just knock it out. All the shit that I find massively wrong with SWTOR:

• The main hook for the game is a great story-telling experience in an MMO setting. Which sounds great, I bet it would be great. That’s not at all what SWTOR delivers. SWTOR delivers a great story-telling single player experience in the form of your own personal class quest, which none of your friends can interact with (although can observe) beyond helping you with combat on some of the tougher fights. Your crew is entirely NPCs. In an MMO don’t you think your crew should be people? Multiplayer storytelling is limited to one dungeon per faction that has a notable story element to it, and the riff-raff of your typical RPG sidequests that don’t really matter and are therefore largely generic.
• Character responsiveness is just plain bad. In a game that you will (hopefully) be spending several HUNDRED hours playing, potentially for years, it has to control right. When you activate an ability, or jump, or summon a vehicle, etc, it has to actually *happen*. The game has huge issues with abilities failing because they’re interupting the animations of a previous ability (why is this hard? you have a global cooldown…make sure animations fit inside it…or hell, just clip it off like every other game if another ability is activated). It has also significant jumping sluggishness, which is a huge problem considering there are some fairly intensive platforming elements in the game. Ever play a platformer with terrible jumping mechanics? Yeah, they’re INFURIATING.
• The game shipped with, and still has, completely defunct systems. Systems that were removed from use in beta, but still have a tutorial quest to use them even though they don’t do anything, and continue to confuse new players. Additionally, the replacement for these systems aren’t even taught.
• Learning curve in general…now I’m from an age of gaming where we figured some shit out for ourselves (as mentioned at length here), but in the current times, and indeed in a growing genre, put some basic tutorial shit in, guys. Hell, manuals are pretty much a thing of the past now too, this might be some people’s first PC game. Would it kill you to have a one-time overlay when you first get in that says W is the move forward key?
• SWTOR’s armor system is at war with itself. You have normal items with built-in stats in their normal rarities that are common to RPGs these days, then you also have modifiable armor which has slots to put in mods or augments, so that you can constantly upgrade them. This seems to have been done as a “look how you want to look” system, akin to the “appearance tab” options you have in other MMOs such as EQ2…except worse in every way. Why, you ask? Well because to prevent abuse by just farming boot drops or whatever at the high end and then ripping those mods out to put into modifiable armor in every equipment slot, they decided to lock the most important mod slots as base stats on all end game items. What does this accomplish? Everyone ends up looking exactly the same.
  
  There are two better solutions I can think of off the top of my head. 1) Appearance tab + no modifiable items, or 2) make high end mods and augments slot-specific, such as that you have to use chest piece mods in chest pieces.
• Social armor exists in the game. It contains a full array of mod slots so that you can make it into useful armor. For some reason, all social armor is classed as Light armor and will only function as light armor (so that all classes can wear it). This therefore makes it completely useless to medium armor and heavy armor classes, and they take significant mitigation penalties. Should have stuck with appearance armor slots instead, huh?
• Storytelling flaws. Being an RPG, particularly of the MMO variety, there’s level and gear progression. So tell me, why am I fighting Jedi/Sith Masters in the 20s in a level 50 range? More importantly, why are they “normal” or “strong” targets instead of Champion strength? These are Jedi/Sith *masters*, right?
  
  Additionally, I have a companion on my Sith Warrior who was a slave that was transferred to me, right. After a while she’s like “Hey, could you like…remove my slave collar? Since we’re getting along and all.” And I’m a nice guy, so of course the answer is yes. Some time later, I’m doing some quests for her, against cause I’m a nice guy, and in all the cinematic related to them, she has a slave collar on! What gives!? Some storytelling guys.
• Huge mob difficulty disparities. For about the first 25 levels, any force-user that you fight is a complete pushover, and pretty much any commando type mob brings the pain. Around level 30 they start to even out, and in the high 30s force users start annihilating everything and non-force users are about the same. It’s just weird and doesn’t make much sense.
• Light Side/Dark Side (aka moral choice) system. As with all Bioware games, they don’t have this quite right. Unfortunately, I think it’s far worse in SWTOR than it is in other titles. You’re largely urged into one side or the other due to some equipment and items being locked behind a required number of light/dark points, and also the major story arcs seem to have a dark side path and a light side path. Neutrality (better known as “being a reasonable person”) is not exactly great.
  
  The biggest problem is that the general concept is that Light Side choices = the “good” ones, morally speaking, and Dark Side choices = the “bad” ones. Alternatively, as many have pointed out, it seems to be closer to “Lawful Good” and “Chaotic Good” for Republic and “Lawful Evil” and “Chaotic Evil” for the Empire…but even that doesn’t fit all that well. For example: After raiding a ship to capture a high ranking imperial officer that has defected and knows a ton of military secrets, you’re given a choice. Dark side points = kill him. Light side points = take him prisoner and send him off to be “questioned”. You know how Sith typically deal with “questioning”, right? Especially of traitors? That means I’m sending him to be tortured. Great choice, give me those light side points.
  
  As I’ve said before, the Light Side in SWTOR is almost always the best Dark Side. Light side choices seem to be mostly about doing bad shit, but you personally don’t look bad. Kind of like Batman. Guy should have killed the Joker a loooong time ago.
• Interface. We’re going to need sub-bullets for this one, there’s so much shit wrong.
  • You can’t have more than two windows open at a time (in very rare cases you can manage 3, but they’re pretty specific). How does this even…I don’t understand. We’re in an age of very high levels of multitasking, and MMOs as far back as I can remember supported a ton of windows open (how many bag slots did EQ1 have back in the day? Was it 6 or 8?). This is made worse by the fact that some windows open automatically, such as when your crew members complete a mission, and then close one of the other windows you had open, thus interrupting whatever you were doing. This is hugely terrible design, ESPECIALLY for a PC game.
  • You can’t move windows. They’re all locked in place. You’re stuck with where they’re at. I wonder what other game twelve years ago supported moving windows……………oh right, EQ1.
  • The quest log is limited to 25 quests, and there are a ton of quests you can’t delete. First off, let me start by saying that this is a problem in virtually every quest-based MMO to date. There is no reason to have capped quest logs. It saves what, a couple kilobytes in a player file? So you figure across your entire MMO empire you need to spring for an extra gig or two? Oh man. Totally a reason to get in the way of the player. This is made significantly worse by the fact that you can’t delete a huge multitude of quests. I’m okay with you not being able to delete your core class quest…fine (although it shouldn’t take a quest slot…) but comon. Anything else I should be able to drop and go pick up again if I want it. So now I have a quest log full of quests I probably won’t do, at least not for a long while, and I can’t get rid of them.
  • For some inexplicable reason they changed from the universal convention of listing party members in a downward order, so that part member #2 (with #1 always being yourself) is on top, to one that goes in reverse. Without informing anybody. So you’re a healer, and you’re like “oh damn, party member #2 needs heals!” and you hit that F2 key (select party member #2) and start healing, but wait! Party member #2 dies! Why!? I healed him! Oooooooooh because he’s party member #4 because you decided to go from the bottom up for who the fuck knows why. And since we can’t move windows, we can’t fix that…
  • Quest-related clickable objects. Say you need to scan a guy for a quest to find out if he’s a traitor. You have to open your inventory, click the quest items tab, and with the obstruction that the inventory window causes because you can’t move/resize it, right-click it while targeting him. Or hotkey it, in your already limited and crowded hotkey real estate so that you can activate it that way. While it’s significantly more recent (as in a couple years instead of 12), it has become a great feature and expected convenience to be able to click the quest item right from the quest tracker. Can’t do it, for some reason.
  • When you put a stackable item into your bank storage, it doesn’t autostack with like items. Comon guys, really? What year is this?
  • Raid member health bar windows suck to the point that they’re completely unusable. Why couldn’t you at least make them the same as party member windows? Hell, you can’t even accurate READ the raid health bars, healing is a nightmare.
  • Auction house search features. You can’t narrow down the search to a specific slot, so let’s say you’re looking for a heavy armor helmet. You select armor, you select heavy armor, and that’s it. No helmet selection. So you have to dig through all the heavy armor for helmets. Well that’s been in EQ1 since the bazaar so…..Luclin in 2001. 10 years behind the times again. You also can’t search by name until you search through the filters. So I can’t just go to the AH and be all “I need microscopic organisms plz!”, I have to go and select Crafting Material –> Bioanalysis –> Start search, then once the search goes, I can type in microscoptic organism to filter it down. Again…bazaar…luclin. And then the level restriction filter just plain doesn’t work. Searching for level 25-50 items still shows level 3 items.
  • The talent window doesn’t have any indications to show when you can put points in higher tiers until you can actually put points in higher tiers. It assumes you played WoW/Rift and just know that tiers are 5 points each.
  • The companion bar. Your crew consists of several companions, one of which you can bring with you at a time to aid in combat and harvesting. As with all combat pets in all MMOs, these companions have abilities. Unlike all MMOs where the pets get their own damn window for you to manage their abilities from, SWTOR requires it to take up one of your hotbars. One of the only four hotbars you’re allowed to have, of which you need all 4 of them to even fit all of your abilities and clicky items on. You can also minimize it so that the companion is active and you have all your hotbars, but a) you shouldn’t have to. Pet windows are *standard*. b) The pets are buggy as shit and routinely turn on abilities that you’ve disabled (such as taunts or area effect abilities) to prevent issues, or switch stances without being told to.
  • Target of target. We don’t have it. Why the fuck not? ToT is fucking standard and has been for a few years now.
  • Offensive target/defensive target. It’s not standard (unfortunately) but sure as hell should be. Where is it?
  • Area effect indicators and targeting. A *very* common mechanic in this generation of MMOs is “don’t stand in the stuff™”. In order to know that you shouldn’t stand in the stuff, these particular effects come with an indicator, be it a symbol on the ground, or you know, ROARING FLAMES in that area, or purple goo, or big black circles, or something to that effect. SWTOR has these…they’re also in almost every case graphically too small for what the actual area of effect is. So you get out of the stuff…except you’re still in the stuff. This gets you killed. Similarly, the targeting for your own area effects has a targeting display…that is smaller than the effect. So you end up hitting more shit than you want to, which causes all sorts of problems as well.
  • Targeting via the mouse is extremely “sticky”, as in its very difficult to target objects/corpses/mobs behind other objects/corpses/mods because the foreground one takes more targeting space than it actually should. We’re using one of the most precise input instruments in existence, known as our beloved mouse, why is it so fucking hard to target shit you want to target?
  • Skill training window is broken down into your class (Sith Warrior) and your subclass (Sith Juggernaught). Why? It’s confusing for no reason. People (as I’ve been watching general chat) are routinely wondering where their subclass abilities are, because they miss the tab that shouldn’t be there at all. You don’t care what’s common to the other subclass and not…from level 10 onward, you are your subclass and you stop caring about everything else. Put it all in one place.
  • You can’t import settings from another character, apply settings to all characters, or even copy a settings .ini to another location on your computer. For some reason all your keybinds and several gameplay-related settings have to be reset every single time you start a new character. This is *standard*, why it this not in!?
  • Maps. Maps on city worlds don’t even fucking work. Maps on worlds with wilderness work pretty okay. Maps also have this supposedly nice “feature” where it will light up green the stairways/flight paths/etc you need to go through to get to where your quest objectives are. These things also tend to get stuck in a loop, leaving you with something far worse than no guidance…wrong guidance.
  • Macros. We don’t have them. There’s some shit that you just need to macro, like “Hey guys, target kill order is blahblahblah”. This is a *standard* feature of MMOs. EQ1 has it…again.
  • No hotkeys for assigning target marks. Do you have any idea how slow it is to mark targets from a right-click menu? Unusably slow. Hotkeys for marks are *standard* goddamnit.
  • No dungeon finder & terrible LFG system. Now I’m not a huge advocate for Dungeon Finders, I think they have a whole slew of problems and I don’t particularly like them. That said, if you don’t have that you need to at least have a half-decent LFG system, and SWTOR’s LFG system is fucking terrible.

• Zone design & flow/pacing. Zones are designed “realistically” rather than for proper gameplay pacing and you know…*fun*. This is of course a TERRIBLE IDEA. What it results in is a lot of boring running. Lots and lots of running. Except it’s not running. The base run speed is SLOW. Base run speeds these days are pretty quick, and we’ve had run speed boosts since well…forever (oh selo’s accelerendo, how I love thee). This results in a lot of SLOW walking which means more boredom. You then get Sprint at level 14 which is a permanent out-of-combat run speed buff of 65%! Wait…what? WHY IS THAT NOT LEVEL 1!? It at least gets you to a decent run speed. Why would you torture people for 14 levels!? So then you go and at level 25 you can get a “speeder”. This “speeder” lets you go 90% faster! So…it lets you go 35% faster than on foot. This *is* the future right? This is star wars? What the fuck? The fastest speeders in the game (requiring level 50) go 110%. Exciting.
  
  This even occurs in dungeons, lots of running back and forth to different parts of whatever area you may be in.
• Taxis. Flight paths in MMOs aren’t always the most expedient things, lord knows the first time I flew from Darnassus to Tanaris in WoW was the last time I flew from Darnassus to Tanaris…but the taxi paths are nothing short of fucking ridiculous on city-worlds, such as Nar Shaddaa and Coruscant.
• Tradeskills. There’s 6 tradeskills, plus 8 harvesting skills. Of these six tradeskills, only one of them provides beneficial exclusive item options. That makes you pretty dumb for taking any other tradeskill, since all of their stuff is tradeable and they have no perks, so you just buy what you need from them and then you’re done with them. Kind of a problem. Everyone’s going to be a Biochemist. Reusable hour-long buffs, reusable healing potions, reusable short-duration buffs with large effect. Can’t go wrong.
• Class design & dual spec. In furthering the trend of declining group sizes (6 in EQ era games, 5 in WoW era [except EQ2 which is still 6]), SWTOR has a max group size of 4 people. This now means that a full HALF of your group is critical roles (arguably this was true in EQ1 as well, as you needed tank/heals/support). So of 4 people in the group, you need a tank + a healer + 2 whatevers (preferably damage dealers). This is made not so bad by the fact that classes can perform multiple roles based on their spec…except for two. Everyone can do tank/dps or heal/dps…except Marauders (and their Jedi equivalent, Sentinels) and Snipers (or their Smuggler equivalent, Gunslingers). Why would you lock yourself into being DPS-only? Worst. Idea. Ever. And then there’s the part where you can’t keep two separate specs, so switching roles when needed (for instance, doing a group activity) is impossible. Dual-spec has become *standard*. Where the fuck is it?
• Trash vs Named difficulty. This has been an increasing problem in MMOs as of late, and SWTOR takes it to the new extreme. In group areas and dungeons, trash pulls are almost universally harder than the boss mobs. This is a pretty severe problem. How does that even happen?
• No mentoring/level sync system. Unfortunately again, not a standard feature in MMOs but should be. For some reason MMOs keep releasing without options to more properly group with your friends who have different schedules and playtime investments.
• Quest sharing. In a very large number of cases, you can’t do it. This is an MMO, right? We should play with friends? So what the fuck?
• No combat logs. I wish I was joking.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m tired of writing about the multitude of shortcomings in this game.

And then with all of these issues, most of which are hugely hot topics on the SWTOR forums right now, Bioware is committing the largest sin of all: remaining silent. They have no community managers, or don’t allow the community managers to say anything. This is a huge problem for any community driven game. Get your asses in gear, Bioware.

In closing, I’d like to pose the question…what the fuck happened in beta? Either every tester that was in beta beyond stress testing was in full fanboi mode, and a terrible tester, or Bioware listened to no feedback. There’s no way most of this shit should have made it in to a launch product.

]]> http://www.theartofrandom.com/?feed=rss2&p=2172 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2166 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2166#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:50:37 +0000 Random http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2166 Last night I decided it was time to do a little more adventuring in Skyrim. So I loaded up my warhammer style warrior-priest (2H hammers, heavy armor, no archery, no thieving, etc) and went wandering about. After finding a heavily sealed crypt through not one, but FIVE puzzle doors requiring multiple keys, the last (?) of which I don’t seem to have (but I remembered getting one from a vendor chick on another character) I go hunting for that key. After finding said key and determining it wasn’t what I need, I set out, slightly bitter, to the northern snowy reaches.

It was there I found an obsessed wizard puzzling over a dwarven cube of some variety. An obsessed wizard in service to a daedric lord. He needed some things done, and mentioned an Elder Scroll, so naturally my interest was piqued. He sent me off to adventure through a dwarven ruin without too much fanfare, and off I went!

Upon my arrival, it was much like any other dwarven ruin, although markedly absent of Falmer (blind, mutated, fishy - formerly snow elves) which I was thankful for. The place turned out to be three zones big though, and I ran into my Falmer friends in the 3rd, something that slowed progress significantly. Not having any ranged capabilities makes dealing with their hard hitting attacks which include potent poisons somewhat difficult.

After defeating a dwarven construct and working my way through a couple dozen Falmer and assorted robots and the like, I finally came to a door. It was labeled Blackreach. “Huh”, I said to myself, “I wonder what Blackreach is.” Little did I know it was going to be COMPLETELY FUCKING AWESOME.

As those golden dwarven doors flung open, I was greeted with the majestic soft blue glow of a huge subterranean cavern filled with luminescent mushrooms. Pollen-esque particles feel the air so densely, it’s like my glasses are covered in grime. The chimes of singing Nirnroot and the rush of waterfalls fill the entire cavern. Scattered dwarven buildings, spider nests, and Falmer camps litter the expanse.

An alchemist shack lies not too far in, an old fellow doing research on the special breed of Nirnroot found there (for which there are appropriate quests to go along with!), filled with not only his corpse, but a ton of ingredients and research notes and everything, I definitely read a book or two while I was down there. A great many type of creature was to be found within, dwarven automatons, Falmer, charus, frost trolls, a giant, and in fact even a large count of assorted humanoids acting as Falmer servants which is something I had not seem before.

The place is gigantic, I’d estimate the cavern to be about the size of Marus Seru in Everquest, easily the largest indoor area I’ve been in thus far in Skyrim. Connected to it are no less than eleven subzones, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed one or two in my travels. It’s also large enough to have *four* elevators to the surface. With all of the stuff to see and find down there, I was there for a good time, long enough to discover that the cavern is large enough to have it’s own weather, and it did a little snowing as well.

All in all, I walked out of there with a ton of exploring done, an Elder Scroll *gasp!*, an alchemist quest, a fair bit of alchemy supplies, quite a lot of gold, 50+ enchanted items, a ton of soul gems, 5-6 skill increase books, several levels worth of experience, and some memories.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been someplace so enchanting, I can’t pretend to rank the hundreds if not thousands of places I’ve been in the last couple decades, but Blackreach is by far the coolest place I’ve been in Skyrim, and probably the coolest place there is in Skyrim. I highly recommend a journey to it…if you can find it.

Pics, of course:









]]> http://www.theartofrandom.com/?feed=rss2&p=2166 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2163 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2163#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 07:39:30 +0000 Random http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2163 I dreamt that my testicles had abruptly merged (like a StarCraft Archon!) into a giant cancerous mass (the fastest progressing the world has ever seen!) that hurt severely when it swished around. I then woke up and realized my legs had my scrotum in a vice grip and that’s why it hurt. Crisis averted.
]]> http://www.theartofrandom.com/?feed=rss2&p=2163 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2161 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2161#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:20:41 +0000 Random http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2161 It’s like I’m making an evil powerpuff girl.

I’m rather on edge at the moment as I torment myself with everything bad I can imagine, so I figure I’ll type it out in a vain attempt to calm myself the fuck down.

Ever since I started the daunting project of making my own game with the goal of not only entertaining, but supporting myself financially through it, I’ve done nothing but fight with myself over it in a myriad of ways. I’m afflicted, at times, with this crippling fear of complete failure and everything that comes with it. The worst part is that I know it’s completely nonsensical.

I *know* that I know games, I’ve spent a great deal of my life playing them, analyzing them, and loving them. I *know* that I have a “well I guess I better get a job” safety cushion of cash on hand in the case of complete failure. I *know* that I don’t even need that many sales to qualify as a huge success financially, it’s just me after all, and I don’t owe any investors money. I *know* that my marketing plan will do what it needs to. I *know* that this is a period of time filled with golden opportunity for the indie game. I *know* that there’s plenty of room for a game of this type in the market.

Yet despite all that I know, with very strong certainty, I can’t help but think that I know nothing at all. That I’m wrong about every single component. That I’m an old dog with old tricks, out of touch with the current generation of gamer. That the money wells will magically run dry and I’ll passively watch as they do. That a few thousand sales is an impossible task. That my game will go unnoticed and crawl into the shadows. That people only want their flashy modern military shooters. I can’t help but by overwhelmed by a whirlwind of doubt, plummeting from the summit like a paladin who’s god has forsaken him.

I want to ignore it all, and bury myself in the medium that I love. I want to go on any other adventure besides this one, I want to go where I know how to get back up again after being knocked down. I want to escape into someone greater than I, despite knowing that every character I’ve ever played is a piece of me. I want to throw it all away and cower behind the tedium and monotony of a cushy desk job. I want to fail before I’ve given myself a chance to succeed. I want finality and the instant gratification I’ve become so accustomed to. Months of uncertainty is torturous.

Fear and dismay turn into disgust, as I sit here weak and whimpering. Afraid of what, myself? Pathetic. Appalling that I find myself with such meek mental fortitude.

So when I’m not busy feeling helpless and sorry for myself, I’m running into more practical issues. As has always been an issue with me and art throughout my entire life, I’m *never* happy with it. Not once. I could work on a small image for 800 hours and not be done with it. It is *never* good enough. But seeing as how I’ve made the foolish decision to let myself be the guy that has to say “hey bro, it’s good enough, move on” I’m begrudgingly doing that. Thankfully I’m not wasting too much time being a perfectionist.

The other issue, as is ever present in the entire industry, is actually making deadlines to ship the damn game. So hard to cut stuff that I know I can’t fit in =/. But seeing as how I’m my own producer, I have to do that shit too. Ugh. Gota make sure it ships, no matter how much it hurts to cut stuff. Being your own boss is a shitty job, yo.

Viola. Feeling better already. Back to work I guess. Powerpuff Girls ftw, btw.

]]> http://www.theartofrandom.com/?feed=rss2&p=2161 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2157 http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2157#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 01:02:11 +0000 Random http://www.theartofrandom.com/?p=2157 I’ve played…well, let’s say ‘a lot’ of RPGs in my day. This afflicts me with a terrible situation where if there’s anything at all in a dream that can be leveled up, I’m sure as shit going to level it up before the I wake up. This leads to a lot of long sleeping when alarms are not involved =/.
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