Life when waiting for the next updates…

Both Survivalcraft & Minecraft Pocket Edition have new updates in the pipeline. This is no surprise for SC as Kaalus works like a madman to update his creation, but for MCPE an update is akin to rocking horse shit so this is big news. It’s also big news for me as I’ve pretty much stopped playing both so I’m hoping that these updates will give me a renewed sense of interest in the games.

For SC I’d really like to see more emphasis on surviving, goals to achieve and strive for, dangers to overcome. Kaalus says he’s working on just these so I’m really looking forward to 1.22

For MCPE the fact they are adding realms, online servers for collaborative play, excites me a lot if for no other reason than I’ll be able to play with The Boy when I’m away from home. It also means I can invite friends to my place and we can work together on… I don’t know, stuff. MCPE doesn’t have as much to offer as SC but the ability to play online with other players is going to be huge!

So roll on the end of May when I think both will be out and I maybe I’ll be enthused enough to start playing and blogging about them again. Maybe.

 

Entering Ingress…

I heard about Ingress sometime last year, I’m not sure when but I’m guessing around July or later and I was sufficiently interested & intrigued to request an invite.

And then I heard nothing and forgot all about it.

Until November when my activation code came through and I finally got the app working on my phone, at which point I realised I didn’t actually know much about the game. Frantic googling ensured and I found the slick Niantic Project website where the board of clues had been largely filled up. I flicked to the start of the timeline and read/watched every item pinned to the board in order. by the end I was totally drawn in to what seemed to be an exciting game layered on the world I actually inhabited.

Once I had devoured the marketing, the reality of the game’s beta status hit me when I found nary a portal anywhere near me! I live in suburbs of a small town and not only was the area around me empty, but the town itself was devoid of any Ingress action at all! By Xmas I was deep in Minecraft Pocket Edition and Ingress slipped from my mind.

Until last week when I found myself working in London in glorious weather (inclement weather is a bit of a ball ache for playing this game – waterproof phones and contact gloves are a must in wet, old Britain) and I set to trying to get my head around how exactly to play. Its not that it’s difficult, more that without actually doing it it can seem confusing. Well it did to me but once I found some portals near the hotel and began hacking them like a man possessed to get at their goodies hidden within

This was my first portal hack, a statue in Russell Square Park. It gave up a resonator (needed for opening portals), some XM bursters (weapons to destroy resonators and allow portals to be taken from the enemy), and a media file which turned out to be a rather entertaining weekly need update produced to Google’s usual high standards.

Ingress – First Portal Hack (London, 23 April 2013)

I spent the next few days as I travelled between meetings hacking every portal I came across, friend or foe. I didn’t bother attacking much as every bugger in London seems to be a Level 8 and I hadn’t really got passed the start of 1.

Anyhoo, I can report I really enjoyed the spy-lite-like fun of Ingress and I’ll be playing it more over the summer, assuming/hoping we have more than two weeks of sunshine this year of course!

Have you tried it? If so what did you think? If not, let me know why as I’d be interested to know what you guys think of it.

By the by, I’m on the side of the Enlightened…

 

Hello to my mystery reader :)

According to my blog stats, someone is reading all my old LOTRO posts which is lovely to see. Even though I don’t play it anymore (and never will again unless it suddenly becomes a lot less grindy) I had a blast in Middle Earth and really enjoyed the posts I wrote about it, especially Keltorn’s tale which was going to follow my Warden through to the end until I lost heart in the game.

So whoever you are, I hope you are enjoying my scribblings. Leave me a comment or two and say Hi

 

The creativity of a child…

I only put Minecraft Pocket Edition on my tablet after I returned home from work and found number one child had fooled the Good Lady Antfarm into buying it for him on her tablet. I decided to buy it on mine so I could both help him but also ensure there was nothing in there that I needed to worry about. Luckily, for the missus and I at least, there was no online element to the game. Indeed, the only multiplayer aspect is by two or more players joining a game on a Wi-Fi network which meant that we, me and The Boy, could play together!

From the get-go he’s loved the creative mode more than the survival mode, I think it’s the fact that the survival game is all about long-term planning with delayed rewards whereas the creative game gives you all the fun stuff up front and allows you to build without the restrictions of needing to mine and manage supplies. He set his first world up and called it Tattyland – I have no idea what it means, he just liked the sound of it and this perfectly encapsulates the difference between my ability to build and his: I stop to ask questions whilst he just builds what he likes, and it’s this naturalistic approach has resulted in some amazing creations

Last week, in some father/son bonding time during some time off work we fired up the tablets and he gave me a tour of Tattyland and honestly I was blown away! I had no idea just how much he’d built since we set the world up at the start of last December! I took loads of pictures and here are just some of the things a 6 year old has built in MCPE with minimal to no adult help

This is an aerial view of the most developed quarter of Tattyland. This shows some of his earliest builds when he was experimenting with laying walkways across water and fencing off areas of both land and water to create lagoons. He also built an entire series of houses with complex room structures and really interesting material usage (the entirely glass block house is brilliant!)

This tower came after the houses and was his first fort. In building it he discovered he could build higher and higher as well as section of the inside into different floors. He put in bedrooms for the soldiers and lookout stations on the roof as well as secret doors and stairs all over the place

Recently this motif of freestanding portals/doorways has been popping up all over and I can’t help but think how architecturally assured such a division of space is, and he does it without thinking!

These complex builds are a combination of houses, passageways, secret tunnels and other builds such as gardens and a pub. They all put me in mind of the Fallingwater House

This is the tower he built after he discovered he could layer up coloured wool and it serves no other purpose than to be ruddy huge

This is The Boy atop a tower he built as I flew around taking these snaps. Beyond the endless mining, beyond the cartoony baddies and the need to farm sheep & wheat, Minecraft is a wonderful tool that can allow a 6 year old kid to build some amazing creations to show his seriously impressed old man, and for that alone it’s well worth the £5 it costs

 

More soldiers like this, please…

Whilst I’d still like to see more old NPCs in Tyria, you can’t fault Arenanet’s eye for a beautiful lady

 

Between the hooves and the boots…

There is a wonderfully de-forested plain in Guild Wars 2′s Kessex Hills where the Seraph and the Centaurs are locked in an ongoing tug-of-war struggle for dominance. As a player you get to beat off waves of invading Centaurs and should you fail then the Serpah are pushed back until they lose control of the area, a state that not only means travel there is more dangerous but the Seraph settlements have less to offer you in terms on vendors. The shot below is of Jurak (my main, a human engineer and at the time of typing this a proud Level 20) stood on the walls of the Seraph fort looking across to the Centaur encampment and I think you’ll agree it’s a bloody impressive looking place!

Whilst I was there, the Centaurs had been beaten back and the Seraph patrolled the camp (camp seems too small – this was a fort really) and I was checking out the vendors that had entered the fort with the Seraph when a dynamic event kicked off that saw the Centaurs try and retake their fort en masse. Boy that was a fun fight but in the end the combined might of the Seraph and the players saw them off and all was once more calm. And that’s when I heard something that piqued my interest. An NPC shouted to her commander (another NPC) that she had salvaged enough supplies to build an arrow cart that could protect the nearby mine… Mine? Arrow cart? This, I thought, must be one of the cues that Arenanet had said we must look for at the end of an event that would herald in another event, and boy did it ever!

Now I seemed to have been the only one to notice the NPCs because a few moments later I was alone and escorting the soldier with the supplies along the road. Thankfully by the time the Centaurs attacked (as you knew they must) a few other players had joined me and we had a long series of fun raiding attacks to deal with until we got to the mine settlement at which point the soldier built a working arrow cart (I used it, it was working alright) and left for the fort. Again the players began to vanish but I stuck around. Something about this cart, this working cart, struck me as odd. No one would put a working cart here if it wasn’t supposed to be used, would they?

Hell no! Although there seemed to be no NPC signal this time, the event chain moved on again and the Centaurs now attacked the village & mine! I leapt on the arrow cart and fired away like it was grouse season but I seemed to be the only one who knew the cart was there & could be used and soon I was overrun by Centaurs and the cart destroyed. By now a sizeable group of players had been attracted by the fight and the village was in chaos! There were Centaurs everywhere and the whole place was going off like Blackpool Illuminations (google it). I fought like a demon but their numbers were too many and I went down! And then a lucky kill rallied me and I was back in the action! I jumped back in with renewed vigour until, at long last, the Centaurs were, for the third time in that event chain, driven back. Boots had triumphed over hoofs, for a little while at least. Ahhh, good times

And people wonder why I love dynamic events so much

Take that, you strangely sexy hoofy, horny lady with a tail, you… Boy, now I think about it, I could quite easily fancy a Centaur…

 

Turning it to 11…

My new PC arrived yesterday. As it is somewhat of a contentious issue in the Burro household I neglected to do a happy dance or release the wOOts and cleverly opted for ignoring the ruddy great cardboard box in the front room to instead talking to Mrs Antfarm and the wee Gazellelings about their days. I nearly burst a blood vessel in my brain pan with the stress of it all* but I pulled it off and after I got The Boy to bed I decided that enough time had passed for me to nonchalantly unpack the beast* and disappear off to my tiny computer room and see what my new toy could do.

70 FPS in Guild Wars 2 with everything set to 11, that’s what! Bloody hell! It’s like (if you pardon the expression) shit off a shovel! All quad core i7 speed with GTX560 muscle. Take a look at the stats on the Amazon page here.

It’s a luxury, yes. But… but… Look just bugger off – you’re starting to sound like Mrs Antfarm. Leave me alone, you bullies!

* Me to The Boy: How was your day at school? Fine. Did you like your new teacher? Yeah. What did you do? Nuffin. Nothing? What about reading? No. Sums? Yeah. Ah, what sums. Don’t remember. OK, what about writing? No. No? You must have. Did some spelling. Ah, what words? Can’t remember. Well, hard or easy words? Both. Both? So you could do some but not others? I don’t even know what your saying Dad. *I gave up and muttered to myself about why I was daft enough to have had kids*

** not a euphemism, at least not in this instance, woof woof!

 

The beguiling promise of Guild Wars 2′s Dynamic Events…

Back when I was still playing LOTRO & I failed a quest my immediate thought was more often than not “Damn! Now I have to do this snaserfrassing thing again!” Now contrast that with my time in Guild Wars 2 where the failure of a dynamic event led me to think “Uh oh… things are about to get very interesting!” and that, I’m sure you’ll agree is a big difference.

Now you readers who don’t play MMOs or aren’t following the development of Guild Wars 2 may be wondering what the buggeration a “Dynamic Event” is. Well, let me fill you in on the basics and then point you to some people on YouTube who are far better placed than I to actually show you how these rather wonderful things work.

To start with you need to understand a little about how other (older) MMOs handle their quests. They offer you a simple mechanic whereby you interact with an NPC or in-game object to receive your orders which you then carry out before returning to the ‘giver’ to receive your reward. If you failed you’d have to start again & if you succeeded you moved on to the next quest or to the next quest giver. All well & good but oh so very functional & flat. The storytelling is linear, boring & unsatisfactory.

So Arenanet has decided to do away with this system and instead employs a dynamic mechanism whereby events just happen in the world & it is up to the player to get involved. This time failure doesn’t mean starting again but rather seeing the quest event dynamically evolve into another narratively linked event. Bandits suddenly attack the city’s water supply and if you stop them then the event changes on the fly from having you protect the pipes to having you hunt down the bandits all the way back to their hideout. But if you fail and the bandits destroy the pipes before you can drive them back then the event morphs into a desperate struggle to protect the repair crews sent out from the city to restore the supply. And this is just two steps of several along two branches of many in one dynamic event of hundreds in the world where the developers can add new ones quickly & easily. It’s an amazingly flexible, powerful & immersive system that’s also a huge heap of fun to experience in action, I’m sure you’ll agree

But the beauty of dynamic events, like that of HDTV or Jen from Milkshake, has to be seen to be believed so I have lined up a few choice clips from fellow beta players.Take a look & let me know what you think of the system. I hope they help some of you who might be wavering about pre-purchasing the game to make up your mind and come adventuring with me in Tyria

CaraEmm explains the branching, escalating nature of dynamic events in Guild Wars 2:

CaraEmm explores the consequences of failure in dynamic events:

MMOHut explains how dynamic events unravel:

Way back in the press-only betas TotalBiscuit explored how one dynamic event snowballed as he played:

 

Purpose is what gives life meaning…

MMOs, in my limited experience, strive to do something that Second Life never did. Well, if I’m honest they offer up several things but for the purposes of this post I just want to look at NPCs and what they do when they are not dealing with players. In Second Life there were no such things as NPCs unless created by the users and the AI on offer (again coded by users) ranged from not very good through terrible to non-existent, but that was fine because SL was never about providing NPCs in the same way an MMO has to. In the vast majority of MMOs NPCs are vital as they provide ‘touch down’ points for players to interact with the game’s systems such as the story or inventory management or item upgrading. Bottom line is if every NPC in every MMO went on strike tomorrow the who damn shebang would fall on its arse in an hour.

MMO worlds are touted as living, breathing creations for us to explore and despite the huge amounts of available evidence to the contrary we believe this falsehood. Predominantly I believe this is simply because we want to. We want to believe our games are alive so we can more easily feel we too are a living, breathing part of them and that’s why when we are confronted with NPCs who just seem to stand on the same spot forever it breaks this feeling and upsets us.

Take LOTRO for example, I mean why are the street traders in Bree stood at their stalls all day every day no matter what time it is or what the weather is like? Do they never go home to their loved ones? If I stayed at work all night the missus would have my guts for garters and yet these guys happy to stay there way past their tea time? Same goes for the gate guards, why are they always the same blokes every single time you see them? Does their captain not rotate them? And then there are the old codgers in the same small room of Scholar’s Tower! How come they are always ruddy well there? Sigh… I could go on. Turbine’s Middle Earth is full of immersion-breaking static NPCs & disinterested animals, which is a real shame.

You see for a world to be alive the people in it must have purpose. We the players do, from slaughtering rats and bears and boars by the zoo-full to raiding the deepest dungeon for the sword of punchy slicey death but this is wasted when the NPCs are nothing more than glorified window dressing. When they never move, never interact, never do anything interesting or even mundane then the world no longer feels alive and instead begins to look flatter than a witch’s tit.

And that’s where I’m hoping Guild Wars 2 will improve on things. Arenanet seems to have worked really hard on making their NPCs live and work in their world and that really makes me want to explore just to see how far they have gone with this. So far I’ve found animals that attack each other, guides that show you around interesting areas, woodcutters that carry logs between piles, children that play games, guards that defend their posts and a dozen other little ways in which, at last, the purposeless are given purpose and the world comes that little more alive. I really hope Tyria is the first world I’ve found that really makes believe it is alive

 

Why I game: The importance of fun.

In my last post I went over the main reasons I can never seriously play LOTRO, or any grindy MMO again and whilst it’s all very well for me to say what I hated about LOTRO maybe I should balance that out by telling you what makes me not only want to play a game but then come back to play again and again.

The answer, it turns out, is simple. Fun. Just pure, unadulterated fun. And if a game isn’t providing me with fun then I have to ask myself what the hell is the point in playing it, which seems to be a point of view Arenanet agrees with

But what, for me at least, makes a game fun? Well now that is a question that can’t be answered so simply but being the brave little soldier I am, I’ll try

Tell me a story…

First off I need a story. I’m a narrative driven lad and I can’t tell you how many games I’ve dismissed lately because their stories were either weak or sounded far too generic. LOTRO obviously had a huge advantage with me here because I’ve been in love with Middle Earth since reading LotR when I was about 13 but even when it came to GW2 I have to say I was very sceptical. Every time I heard about the game, every fan blog post or podcast that joked about its release date just reconfirmed what I thought to myself – it sounded like yet another cookie cutter fantasy game that would annoy me for poorly mimicking Tolkien. Yet something kept dragging me back, kept pulling my attention towards the game. Eventually it was Rubi Bayer’s enthusiasm in the Massively Speaking podcast that convinced me to actually look into the game seriously and almost straight away I loved what I read – here was a game who’s designers not only wanted to make it fun but wanted to pour in enough lore to sink several other lesser MMOs. I found myself suddenly falling in love with a whole new world.

Let me play, not think…

After a story I need easy gameplay. I don’t mean some kind of dumbed down system but rather an intuitive experience that is easy to learn and soon becomes second nature. The control system for Left 4 Dead 2 is a dream – it vanishes into the background and just lets me play. At the other end of the scale is the Legendary Item system in LOTRO which just leaves me scratching my head and feeling very, very frustrated. Somewhere in between is nice – the skills system in GW2 recently went from (for me at least) a big old mess of “choose anything y’all!” to a much-easier-to-understand-without-spending-hours-searching-wikis-and-forums tree system. I like that. It is powerful yet I can instantly understand it and not break my play-fun-headspace in the way that even thinking about LOTRO’s LIs does.

I vant to be alone, dharlinks…

Next I need to be alone. I want to be able to play the damn game alone. But I also want to be able to group dead easily. A contradiction I know, but one that I know I’m not alone in. I loved the group play in Left 4 Dead (ignoring the arseholes you could get stuck with), found things a little more restrictive and forced in LOTRO and breathed a sigh of relief when I played GW2. Grouping just works in GW2 so well! From formal guild membership to totally ad hoc quest groups, it is just a dream to join up and play with other people. My only note of worry about GW2 so far is about how bloody hard it can be to tackle some things on your own and make no mistake, I like to play on my own. I have kids, limited playtime, my own goals and a grasshopper mind and these things can make playing in a group a pain. I don’t always want to run with everyone else into a cave, I might want to explore the hills above instead and any game that wants to draw me in forever had better understand that. Give me a way to complete the whole damn thing on my own because I guarantee you that 99% of the time that’s *exactly* how I’ll be playing. I have lost count of how many times I simply couldn’t finish quests in LOTRO without asking kin mates for help and every damn time I felt cheated because these very nice people would come over to help with their level capped engines of destruction and reduce my experience of the quest to that of a spectator and that is not fun. Hell, why would I even buy a game I have no hope of being able to play?

Hell is other people…

Another not fun thing is other people, or rather the kind of knobends computer games seem to attract in abundance. One thing I always loved about LOTRO and have almost always hated in Left 4 Dead is the other players. In LOTRO I found a mature & intelligent community seemingly always willing to answer questions no matter how newbie they were. L4D2, on the other thumbless & rotting hand, seems to be infested with pricks. Still, it does mean when you find some good people you stick together for dear life, but that’s hardly a selling point is it. What I’m hoping GW2 manages to achieve is to take the freedom of L4D’s grouping and maintain the decency of LOTRO’s community and if it manages that then I think it will be one hell of a multilayer experience. *crosses fingers and prays to the gods of good friends*

You grind me right down, right down like a record baby…

Speaking of LOTRO and all things not fun, do I need to mention grind again? No, thought not. Still, whilst I may not mention grind I still have to explain what I want to see in its place. For kill deeds I don’t want to kill 300 bloody spiders, I want to tackle a quest chain that leads to a spider queen! For skills I don’t want to find glorified goblin toilet paper (ssorry, missing book pages) by killing 600 orcs, I want to break into a library and steal books! For reputation I don’t want to collect 400 shiny stones from 1,000 piles of recently slaughtered lizard guts, I want to save the chieftan’s daughter from a bloody scary witch’s tower! GIVE ME STORY, NOT GRIND! Make me feel like I’m a hero, not a street cleaner. Jesus H Presley people! If you ever, EVER ask me to waste my time again I’m gone. If, on the other hand, you offer fun, interesting quests and storylines I can feel involved in I will sit on your lap and stroke your luxuriant beard until the cows some home. Grind bad, play good – it is that bloody simple and GW2 gets it.

How much?!?

Do you know what the biggest reason me for never paying an MMO up until last May was? No, of course you don’t, you hardly know me after all but let’s pretend you all guessed correctly and at the same time. Yes, that’s right you clever lot! Monthly subscription fees! Now a tenner a month isn’t much and has always been within my budget (even after kids came along and ruined my whole life blessed me with their sunshine) yet I could never, ever bring myself to consider paying every month for a game. I only took the punt on LOTRO after finding out it was free and even though I bought the 12 month subscription I never counted this as a recurring fee because it just feel like paying for the game. If Turbine hadn’t totally pissed me off with a stupid combination of grind and greed then I would have happily paid another £100 last month, but their loss is my gain and now I have been shown the light by Arenanet it will have to be a very special game indeed that sees me ever, EVER pay more than once to play it.

Greed is so not good…

Did I mention ‘greed’ in that last part? Why yes, I do believe I did. Look dear game companies I totally understand you have to make a profit but when that desire to make money spills over into the realms of pure, naked corporate greed then I’m off. I am *not* a walking wallet for you to dip your hands into at every opportunity and selling me a feature that I feel you should have included into the game is the surest way to piss me off royally (*cough* LOTRO *cough*). Now I have no idea how this is going to work in GW2 but my hope is they put enough items in the shops (both important & fluff) that I want to buy from it without pulling a cheap, shitty stunt like the LOTRO wallet scam. Don’t rip me off and you’ll find more of my disposable income is predisposed to you (see what I did there?).

TL/DR (What do you mean you didn’t read the rest, you rude swines!)

So, there you have it. Just make your one-off purchase intuitive games full of fun, story driven adventures that I can complete on my own or with other friendly people with occasional trips to the cash shop for fun items rather than outright system improvements and I’m all yours, oiled and ready in your tent. Oh, and don’t ever, EVER make me grind. You wouldn’t like me when I grind.