Today I finished the main plot line for Fable 2. I’ve got a lot I’d like to say about it, but frankly I’m not sure how to say everything without spoiling the game for folks who haven’t played it. I certainly don’t want to post explicit spoilers, but later in the post there are some generic ones. I’ll warn you before they start.

Overall my opinion of the game is very favorable. The main story plot line wasn’t incredibly involved but it was enough to keep you moving forward, and it worked as an excellent framework to hang off many incidents that had real impact on me as a player. It was an RPG that spoke to the heart more than to the head.

I do think Molyneaux pulled some punches though, and I wish he hadn’t. And I wish the game had been more difficult. I’m not speaking about combat (combat never gets very hard, but it always feels pretty satisfying) but more about the ‘moral’ system in the game. As I mentioned in an earlier post, you have a Purity/Corruption stat and a Good/Evil stat. From about half-way through the game, my character was 100% Pure/100% Evil, and that was through no deliberate choice of mine, aside from the choice of eating vegetables and passing on meat. Veggies give you +Purity and meat gives you -Purity and +Fatness, and I was just trying to avoid the Fatness.

Money was another issue. Or rather, non-issue. If you invest some time early building a nest egg doing mini-game jobs, then buy a few houses/businesses to generate some income, you’ll never be strapped for cash. Also since business income accumulates even when you aren’t playing, if you take a break for a few days you’ll be even richer. Sure, there are big-ticket items you’ll need vast amounts of wealth for, but they’re really just to get Achievments and don’t impact the plot of the game at all.

And then there’s your family, or families. Another neat system that has very little impact on the game. In theory having a healthy, happy family will get you buffs from spending the night at home, but in practice you never really need to sleep since food, drink and potions will keep you going indefinitely. I only slept at home when the wife wanted sex, and I don’t think the game would’ve been drastically different had I never married.

I’m doing a lot of griping, but understand that’s just my nature… I really did enjoy the game a lot. The world felt very alive, and having the family, the businesses, doing the odd jobs; all of that was fun even if none of it really felt necessary. I just think it would’ve made a great game even better had these systems had more impact.

Part of the challenge, I think, comes from making a game for everyone. I spent a lot of time wandering around, fighting things, doing side-quests, exploring, collecting… just really taking my time. So I improved skills early, and had the gold to get the best weapons early, which meant the game never got hard. If some other player stuck to the main quest, used the Quick Travel feature to get around. and never did any of the ‘extra’ stuff, I’m guess the game would get pretty difficult further along.

Which brings me back to wishing there was a difficulty setting. Maybe some day we’ll get one as DLC.

But, as someone who got bored of Fable 1 and never finished it, I can’t recommend Fable 2 enough. It was an immensely satisfying game.

Spoilers follow. I’ll try to be as vague as possible but stop reading if you want the game to be as full of surprises for you as it was for me.

One of the most emotional moments in the game came when I was…removed from the world…for an extended period. I left my wife, my child, my dog, my businesses…all to fend for themselves for a decade. It wasn’t something I chose to do, and I was really bothered by it.

It just so happened that when this happened it was late at night out there in real life, so I had to quit. I spent the next day fretting about what would happen when my character returned from this exile. As soon as I got home from work I jumped back into the game, and my character returned to the world and… my wife said “You’re back!!” and kid had grown up a bit, but otherwise nothing had changed. My dog was still my dog. The wife had waited for me. The kid politely introduced herself then treated me like her dear old dad. My businesses had continued to collect rent. There was very little indication that I’d been gone so long, as far as personal impact.

Again, I think this is a spot where Molyneaux pulled his punches. I assumed my dog would be dead (and I’d have to get a puppy and raise it), my wife would’ve remarried, my businesses auctioned off. Essentially I assumed I’d have to start anew.

Maybe Fable 3 will take all this stuff a bit further. And I really do hope we get a Fable 3. There’s certainly a setup for one in the game.

I have to confess it’s been quite some time since I last visited Altdorf, but after Jobildo shared the location of my two favorite Warhammer characters, Gotrek & Felix, I knew I had to meet them before my time expired.

Turns out, Altdorf is a pretty happening place these days. But I get ahead of myself. I was far from a Flight Master when I made this decision, and rather than go backwards, I forged ahead into the next tier. Along the way I met this guy, Horst Ohersten, a Healer. I couldn’t help but chuckle. Would you trust this guy, with all those examples of his handiwork cooling in the snow?

Anyway the trip was scary and thrilling as there were plenty of beasties that could’ve had me for lunch, but I got to see another zone and I did eventually make it safely to the next warcamp and flight master. So off I went to Altdorf.

I found my way to Gotrek and Felix. Gotrek was as grouchy as I’d expect, but Felix had work for me in the Bright College. While inside, one of the wizards there asked me to run an errand. And outside I met a peasant with some crazy tale of man-sized rats…which turned out to be true! As I was prowling the streets looking for barrels doing a jig, I wandered past the Blow Hole and got involved in a PQ there. Won first place and got a nice cloak that won’t be wearable until 21. Something to look forward to when I get back.

I’m not sure if these quests scale or what, but all the mobs I had to fight were standard level 20 mobs: perfect sized for a level 17 Witch Hunter to brawl with. Decent kill experience, too. I made about half a level just pottering around in Altdorf, and there’s still more to do in there. This came at a perfect time as manageable solo empire quests were getting pretty thin back in Tier 2.

So don’t forget about Altdorf if you’re out there looking for PvE fun in Warhammer!

Haven’t done a ton of gaming so far this weekend so haven’t had a lot to post about. I did fiddle around with Nile Online a lot yesterday, but that meant checking in on my city every couple of hours. I’m still enjoying that game quite a bit.

One of my PS3 hard drives was getting pretty full so I spent some time cleaning that up. I watched episodes three through six of Qore, the online magazine on the Playstation Network. It’s an entertaining product, but I’m still unconvinced its worth the price, *unless* you’re all about getting into betas. If it gets you into one beta you’re really jazzed about, then the ~$25/year is probably worth it. (My math there is that the product itself is probably worth $15/year and getting into a beta you really really want to get into is probably worth $10 to you.)

In Warhammer, I put all my characters except my Witch Hunter to bed, mentally. I cleaned out their mailboxes, organized their inventory. In the case of my Shadow Warrior I pushed him to the next Rank so he could wear a cloak I’d sent him from another character. That way he’ll look a bit snazzier when I come back to him in a month or two. Everyone is in a camp now, drinking ale and waiting for my return. Everyone, that is, except my CoW character, who I’ll continue to play right up to the cut-off day, though honestly knowing the account is going to expire soon makes that feel a little sad. At the same time I’m already a little excited about the improvements that will be in the game when I come back to it.

Probably next weekend I’ll fire up the EQ2 account so I can get re-familiarized with things before the expansion lands on the doorstep. Hmm, actually that doesn’t bode well for playing Warhammer next weekend, so maybe this will be the last week for my Witch Hunter.

I played some of The Witcher last night. I bought this game a year or so ago and it wasn’t too good, but they released an “Enhanced Edition” a couple months back and offered a free “upgrade” mega-patch to all registered users of the game. I started a fresh game just before the Fall tsunami of new game releases hit. I’m not very far into it but my conscience has been nagging at me not to lose track of it. I started playing it once on release, then restarted for this enhanced version. I know myself enough to realize that if I totally lose touch with the game and have to restart a third time, I never will.

And it seems like a pretty good game now. It feels a little like a cross between Fable 2 and an MMO, actually. It has a skill-based progression (though with ‘generic’ experience so you don’t sculpt your character via actions like you do in Fable 2), action-ish combat (left click to melee, right click to fire a spell, melee chains via timed button presses) like Fable 2, an alchemy crafting system similar to what you’d find in an MMO (with you getting components from foes you slay), NPCs offering side quests and an apparently huge, MMO-sized world. Anyway, we’ll see. I need to get back to Fable 2 today!

So what’s everyone else been up to this weekend?

And now for something completely different…

Tilted Mill, the folks who made the rather enjoyable Hinterland that I’ve previously posted about, have a broswer-based city-building game now in beta, Nile Online.

I’ve been playing it for a week or so now. At first I thought it was really interesting. Then I got kind of bored with it since it seemed to lack depth. And then I realized there was more depth than I at first saw, so now I’m finding it really interesting again.

The basic idea of the game will be pretty familiar to strategy gamers. You start with a small settlement and need to feed your people and grow your empire via resource management. Every starting plot, as best I can figure, has wheat, clay and reed resources. Also each plot has a 4th resource that varies from area to area. I started with Kohl, used in cosmetics. Huh?

Each city has a finite number of building plots. You’ll erect bakeries, brickworks, basket shops, pottery shops, etc. Then you assign your labor pool to either gathering a resource or working in a shop. There are more products than there are building plots, so you’re not going to be able to make everything you need. Building a Market gives you access to goods that other players are selling. Curiously, the currency of the world is bread, which is also the way you feed your people. Buildings and resource plots can be continually upgraded to become more productive.

Nile Online runs in real time and is kind of low-impact gaming. As an example (I’m writing this on my lunch hour) I started upgrading my Market at the start of the hour, but its going to take about 2 hours for that upgrade to happen. So I’ll check in when I get home tonight, perhaps. Early on, level 1 buildings go up pretty quick… 10 minutes or so. Also low level buildings require pretty basic resources, so they’re easy to get going.

Soon enough things become more complicated. My next palace upgrade (which will give me a larger labor pool) is going to require Bricks, Baskets, Perfume, Pottery, and Jewelry (and 3 hours, 40 minutes of time). I can make the Bricks & Baskets, but I’ll need to buy the other items from the Market. I can grow a lot of wheat and bake a lot of bread to buy them, and I’m doing that, but I’ve also been trying to sell some extra pottery. I have a Cosmetics shop to turn my Kohl into Cosmetics, but I also need Henna, which I can’t produce, so I have to buy that. Hopefully I’ll be able to sell Cosmetics for enough to cover the costs of the Henna and still make a profit. Cosmetics are required to found additional cities, and if someone is rich enough to do that, I figure they can pay me well for my goods.

As far as I can tell, there is no player vs player combat in the game, but you can produce troops. Outside my city are “Monument plots occupied by raiders” and I assume these are what troops are for? Documentation for the game is sparse, to put it nicely (but again, this is beta) so I’m learning by doing, and I don’t have the resources (Bronze and Leather) to produce anything from my Spearmen building.

So, still a lot of questions, and ultimately it might not hold my interest. After the initial building process there’s kind of a dead spot where you’re just waiting to have enough bricks and bread to build a new building. But things get more interesting when you start playing the market and needing resources that you can’t product on your own.

It seems like anyone can join the beta. You do have to apply but getting in is really quick. If, like me, you have a lunch hour to fill every day, this is an interesting way to use up a bit of it. And I do find myself checking in before and after work. I’m looking forward to seeing what else the game holds as I grow my city.

As a comment to yesterday’s post, DM Osbon of Construed asked if Fable 2 had anything to teach console MMO developers.

I thought this was a great question and worth a post of its own. I don’t have any answers, just ruminations. But I do like to ruminate, so without further ado…

Let’s start with character development. Fable 2 is not class based. It has three ’schools’ of combat: melee, ranged and magic. There are 4 kinds of experience: one for each of the schools and then some “generic” experience that you can apply as you see fit. Using a school of combat to defeat an enemy causes that enemy to give more experience in that school of combat. So if you prefer slicing and dicing with a sword, you’ll get more melee experience than ranged or magic experience.

Fable 2 is not level based. (Incidentally, Syncaine just posted a good essay on the topic of levels: How important are levels in our MMOs?. Ironically, I argue for them.) Instead, you spend experience points to buy skills to better your ability to perform a particular school of combat. There are three ‘branches’ of skills in each school: these could easily be expanded for longer-term play.

In Fable 2, your actions have consequences. This, I think, is a big one. You have a Good/Evil and a Purity/Corruption rating, and those ratings change depending on your actions in the game. In turn, these ratings impact how others treat you and what opportunities are open to you. Some MMOs have tried to embrace this kind of system, but the problem is you can’t code player behavior. So if my character is evil and corrupt, but I, the player, am a genuinely nice guy chatting with you… is YOUR character going to react to mine as an evil and corrupt entity, or are you going to react to me by having your character treat mine as if mine was nice. Erm… does that make sense?

Fable 2 has business ownership. This is an interesting ’sub-game’ in Fable 2, and one I enjoy, but I’m not sure how you’d implement it in an MMO. So you have a coin purse bulging with gold, you see a nice house, and you buy it. The people that live in it become your tenants and pay you rent. Or you buy a business and get profits from it. You can tweak prices and so forth, which can impact your Good/Evil and Purity/Corrupt ratings.

This works well for Fable 2 as a single player game, but most MMO’s struggle to put in gold sinks, not gold fountains. Plus, cities would have to be huge in order for everyone to get a chance to buy a few businesses. Otherwise players joining the game months after launch would have nothing to purchase.

But speaking of gold… creatures in Fable 2 don’t drop loot when you kill them. You get experience and that’s all. Doing quests gets you renown and impacts your Good/Evil rating. Gold comes from Treasures you find, gifts that people give you, jobs (blacksmith, wood cutter, bartender, bounty hunter, etc) you can take, and goodies you dig up. Most gear comes from vendors. This is far different from the lotto-corpse system of most MMOs. I’m not sure how well MMO players would take to such a radical change, honestly. Oddly, this has been pretty transparent to me so far… I had to stop and think about whether I’ve gotten any gold or gear rewards from doing quests in Fable 2. I assumed I had…but then couldn’t think of any. So I guess I haven’t!

I wanted to add story here, because I while I am very confident that Fable 2 has a really interesting story but I have to be honest: I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve been having so much fun just being “immersed” in the world that I’ve been very slow in following the main quest/storyline. But it’s hard to put a good story into an MMO without instancing the game into a single party experience.

/end rumination

But getting back to Fable 2 as the game I’m playing now, and story progression…

WHOA. Some stuff happened last night that I can’t really talk about yet, because I was forced to stop playing right in the middle of it. Suffice to say that so far the game has been pretty upbeat in tone, even with all the bad things happening. It’s felt “light.” Last night…that changed. I felt it in my heart, not in my head. Which I found pretty freaking astounding for a video game. The only analogy that springs to mind is the feeling I had when reading about Sam & Frodo’s journey into Mordor. Tolkein wrote such heaviness into those pages that I felt their struggle and it seemed like the very pages of the book I was reading were getting hard to turn. (And no, I’m not comparing Molyneaux to Tolkein.) And maybe it was just my mood or how tired I was or something. But events in the game really hit me in a pretty emotional way, and when I shut down the console to head to bed, I felt dazed by the experience.

I can’t wait to get home and get some closure to this situation and see what happens next!

When last we left our intrepid adventurer Sparrow Dumpling Blade Lionheart (a hero’s title is ever-changing), he’d taken on a wife and she’d born him a daughter, Gemma. And he thought that life was complicated.

So innocent and naive, was he.

As it turns out, Deb the Villager is fairly low maintenance. A modest gift here, a good rogering there, a decent allowance for running the house, and she stays pretty happy. In fact things were going so well that a second wife seemed in order. Well, not really. Actually, our man found himself on the horns of a dilemma where he had to be either mean or immoral (if you consider bigamy immoral, as a fairly large percentage of us do). Unless I’m angry, I’m not good at being mean, and I wasn’t angry at this lass, so after much thought, I had our hero marry her, and set up a home in Bowerstone with her.

I expected his Purity rating to plunge, but it didn’t. In fact the only indication that something odd had happened was that I got a Bigamist Achievement! Deb seemed slightly more suspicious the next time her hubby came home, but that might have been my guilty conscience. Yeah, I really felt a bit guilty about the situation!

The thing is, now Lionheart has two places where he can bed down for the night, with a bit of extra warmth in each one. And he gets a nice Purity boon for sleeping there with his wife. After sticking to protected sex with wifey #2 for a while, I hit the wrong button once and now Lionheart has an infant son, Georg, to go with his daughter Gemma.

Between this bonus, and eating lots of fresh veggies (each of which give purity points) he now strides about the land, pure as the driven snow, with a halo floating over his head. I’m not sure what message Fable 2 is trying to convey here… that it’s OK to have several wives as long as you eat your veggies?

He’s pretty Good too, and attractive, and honestly it’s almost becoming a nuisance. He walks into town and half a dozen women surround him, badgering him for a ring or just offering to jump his bones. Y’know, now that I think about it, it’s just like real life!! Seriously, it can be pretty annoying trying to push around these crowds all the time; I wish there was a “Let her down easy” emote our hero could use to tell a lady “You’re a wonderful woman but I’m already married” without making her afraid of or angry at him. The most subtle technique he has now is “Point and Laugh” which evokes reactions that just make me feel terrible!!!

Oh yes, and then there’s this whole adventure…. Lionheart was warned by his mentor and his fellow hero Hammer, that he should put his affairs in order before taking the next step in his quest for vengeance. So he’s been doing that…helping archeologists and breaking gargoyles and protecting the Temple of Light and protecting farmers from robbers and freeing slaves: he’s been a busy fellow indeed.

But I think its about time that he pushed forward on his quest.

My wife wants sex.

I know this to be true because it says so right there on her status sheet. “Wants sex.” The words mock me every time I check up on her, because since the night of our wedding, I’ve been unable to perform.

I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong. The mood is right: the woman couldn’t love me more. I’ve bought us a fancy new double bed so there’s plenty of comfy space to romp around in. I even bought a book on seduction that taught me a smooth “Come hither” move that is supposed to lure women into bed. I tried it on the wife and she giggled and happily followed me to the bedroom but then, again, everything fizzled and she started pointing out the window and saying “Let’s go over there.” ‘There’ being, in her case, the docks, which she loves. Maybe she’s into doing it in public??

In the meanwhile, every time I go into Bowerstone women are throwing themselves at me. It gets a tad annoying, to be frank. What kind of adventurer do they think I am!!? I’ll admit some of them are better dressed than my wife, and their plunging necklines can be somewhat enticing, but I’m a married man, for pity’s sake!!

In other news, I committed my first crime, albeit via misunderstanding. I went into a Tailor’s home, thinking it was his shop. At first they were very welcoming, but then this gaggle of flirty women walked in behind me. That put the tailor and his wife on edge, understandably. A little girl in the crowd asked for a lollipop. I didn’t have one, but I did have some chocolate, so I gave her some. The Tailor got very angry at that, since the girl was his daughter. What did he think I was trying to do? I got angry in return and growled my fiercest growl at him, which flustered everyone.

At that point I wanted to leave but the doorway was blocked, so I went upstairs hoping the crowd would disperse so I could get the heck out of there. That was the last straw for the tailor’s wife, and she called the sheriff. *sigh*

Well it turns out it was a pretty minor infraction, and I paid my dues via community service. This involved ridding a basement of a gaggle of Hobbes which has infested it. It was actually a good workout, and I even found a bit of treasure down there. I’m tempted to commit a few more crimes just so I can get more community service.

It helps me to work out the frustrations I have involving my wife’s needs.

Disclaimer: I have not yet played Fallout 3 (soon I hope!).

GameSetWatch has a really interesting essay up about Fallout 3, it’s moral choices (or lack thereof) and why Bethesda made the game the way they did. Very much worth reading.

In Fallout 3, you cannot kill children.
…
Problematically, in singling out and self-censoring one particular type of ‘crime’ in his game Pagliarulo by implication justifies all the others as being non-gratuitous and necessary. Last night I blew the head from a homeless scavenger girl, one who’s barely into twenties. The slow motion camera tracked her head’s explosion before lingering on the crimson fountain spurting from her neck stump. Is this kind of interaction and feedback ‘socially responsible’? And so then what’s the difference to killing a minor?

Chewing Pixels: ‘I Kill Children’

Last night being Halloween, we spent it all watching the Ghost Hunters Live Event. Seven straight hours of Ghost Hunters doesn’t leave any room for gaming. But can I just say, Amanda Tapping as a guest investigator = epic win. I now have a huge nerd crush on her.

Anyway since I didn’t do any gaming yesterday I don’t have any news to relate. Instead, I want to talk about mean people. Specifically, mean gaming bloggers. And no, I’m not going to include any links: no need to improve mean people’s google page ranks!

Right now it seems like there’s a wave of gaming bloggers leaving Warhammer Online. For the most part these are people who were in the beta, loved the game, got caught up in the hype and the excitement, threw down their money, and found a game very different (and less fun) from what they’d been playing in beta. So they’re disappointed and either a little sad or a little angry, and they’re quitting.

I find this sad. Granted these are just games, but still, to see a person going from excited about an event to disappointed…I have enough humanity in me to see this as unfortunate. But for some bloggers, this is an opportunity to laugh and jeer and enjoy the misfortune of others. That’s just mean and frankly, it says a lot about you as a person.

Even though “gaming” is becoming more mainstream, as “Gamers” (and particularly as “MMO Gamers” we’re still the object of much puzzlement and faint scorn in the greater public. When we go back to work after a few days off and someone asks “Did you do anything fun on your vacation?” most of us won’t say “Hell yeah, I hit level cap with my Priest!” because if we say that, we’re going to be labeled as some kind of anti-social loser, and honestly in a lot of companies this kind of label can negatively impact opportunities for advancement. Instead we say “Ah, I just kind of hung-out at home and relaxed, y’know? Rested up, read some books, watched some movies.” and then the person we’re talking to will smile knowingly and say “Yes, sometimes the best vacation is just to stay home and enjoy the family.” and all is well.

Which is a wild tangent, but my point is I still think we gamers need to stick together and cut each other some slack. The fact that you love World of Middle Earth and I love Warcraft Online is a teeny, tiny, trivial difference compared to the fact that we both love staying home and playing an MMO vs the people who choose to go to the movies/bar/opera/crack den/sports arena/hiking/ballet as their preferred way of spending leisure time.

Tearing each other down just makes our community weaker. How about we all (myself included, I’m certainly not infallible in this respect) try to be a bit more supportive of each other. We’re all gamers, after all. We’ve got plenty of common ground to cover.

So I think I’ve found the secret to Warhammer. Log in with absolutely no expectations.

Last night I had an hour or so before bed so I logged in just to bash about a bit, knock off some solo PvE quests or whatever. And I did that, then headed to Bohsenfels to turn in my assorted heads, books, reports and bobs… that’s when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something unusual.

There’s a little bit of farmland north-east of town, and spectral figures were floating around in it, I thought. But I looked again and they were gone. I decided to investigate and a moment later they were back. Sure enough, I’d stumbled on one part of the Witching Hour event.

After reading Ysharros’ post about the event, I’d pretty much written it off as being an event only for hardcore players that put 40+ hours/week into the game. And to complete the whole thing, it might be. But 15-20 minutes of beating down restless spirits (they’re all of level 2!) is enough to complete the first phase, so now I too have a mask! Important Note: The mask was found on the corpse of the 50th restless spirit I killed. I’m just assuming that wasn’t coincidence and that it was Mythic’s way of delivering the quest goodies for that phase of the live event. All the other spirits I killed had like 3 brass coins and nothing else; I’m glad I’m anal enough that I was still checking them when I hit #50!

I was encouraged by the amount of chat going on in /region, and that a lot of it had to do with RvR, and not just the Witching Hour quests. Keeps were being attacked and defended and the realm was coming together to fight the good fight. I looked at the clock and muttered a curse at myself for waiting until so late to log in (damn you, LittleBigPlanet!!!). But hopefully this level of involvement will continue throughout the event and beyond.

Since I still didn’t have one of those jaunty Witch Hunter hats, I figured I’d just run around with a Goblin Mask on until I found one. I’m all about style! But I realized I still hadn’t turned in the quests I’d finished. And what do you think one of my rewards was? Uh-huh, that’s right: jaunty hat FTW. I just need to get to a vendor who can dye items now. The quests were also enough to push me into Rank 17…one more rank and I can tag along with CoWs in Tier 3!

Tonight will be devoted to the 8 hour Ghost Hunters Live Event on Sci-Fi, but I’m looking forward to jumping back into Warhammer tomorrow. Maybe I can find one of these cauldrons and get part 2 of the event done as well.

Happy Samhain to all my readers! Don’t like the ghoulies get you when you’re out enjoying the holiday!

Is anyone else wondering what the heck is going on at Sony’s Entertainment Division? The past few weeks have seen one mistake after another:

• SOCOM: Confrontation (an online only game) launched with the servers not working at all well. This is secondhand info but I read enough reports about the problems that I’m confident that they were real and widespred. People spoke of spending more time staring at menus waiting than actually playing the game.
• LittleBigPlanet got delayed because of the Qur’an lyrics in one of the music selections for the game. How did this only become an issue in the eleventh hour? Wouldn’t you think you’d get a translation of any song lyrics that were going to be in your game, well before launch? The delay took a lot of the ‘bang’ out of the launch; instead of a single launch day when everyone was getting the game, we got a launch window of about 4 days. Which might have been a blessing in disguise because….
• LittleBigPlanet servers were also borked on launch. Not only did this mean you couldn’t play online, it also impacted the single player game (if you were logged into PSN, which must of us are if our PS3s are internet-connected). I talked about this here; the long and sluggish load times I experienced were indeed caused by the game trying to talk to the servers and not being able to. Not the way to make a good first impression.
• Last and admittedly least, the Mirror’s Edge demo is hitting PSN and XBox Live Arcade this week. There’s a lot of buzz and anticipation built up around this game, and for once, a demo was coming out first on PSN, and not on XBLA until the following day. Except the Playstation Store didn’t get updated until late evening ET. I’m thinking it was somewhere around 10 pm? I started to download the demo, but (Playstation Store servers being the slow beasts they are) had to go to bed before the download was complete. Advantage squandered.

I love my PS3 and during the prior console generation I appreciated the broader range of games offered on the Sony platform than you can generally find elsewhere. But now the JRPG’s are moving to the 360, and the ‘quirky’ games tend to show up as downloadable titles so you can get them anywhere. The only advantage Sony seems to still have is hardware reliability and even that may be fading as Microsoft finally starts getting the 360 hardware right.

Sony has been struggling and this holiday season is its change to turn that around some, and maybe it can. But it needs to stop making these highly visible blunders if its going to gain (and retain) the confidence of gamers. Fable 2 is only on XBox. Fallout 3 looks better on XBox. And Microsoft’s game servers tend to be pretty reliable. Let’s hope that the Resistance 2 servers are rock solid when that game launches.

Everyone else has blogged about this too, but when I was getting ready to write my daily lunch-hour post I was drawing a complete blank. So I’m taking the easy way out.

We are pleased to announce that in the coming days we will be offering Free Character Transfers from our servers with lower populations to a set of servers with higher populations. To help you better prepare for these transfers we have provided additional details below.

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=416

Casualties of War’s Destruction side is on one of the servers that is currently tagged as a ‘Source’ server, so they need to decide if they’re going to move. My Destruction characters are on one of the servers tagged as a “Destination” server, so that’s good news for me. More warm bodies to wreak havoc with. CoW won’t be moving to ‘my’ server though as they’re on a Core Server and I’m on an RP one.

I’m glad they’re not letting people cross server-type lines in the transfer. There actually is RP on my RP server…not big elaborate stuff, but on a small, on-going scale, and its fun.

I’m still on the fence about what to do at the end of this Warhammer Month (the 18th of November, iirc). I enjoy the game when I play it lightly. When I start playing it a lot, the frustration builds. But do I want to spend $15/month for an MMO I’m going to play lightly? On the other hand, I still am somewhat confident that Mythic will continue to improve things (slightly less so after results I’m hearing about this Witching Hour event). And on the third hand, I don’t want to break my ties with CoW.

A perfect solution for me would be a Lifetime Subscription offer. That I’d snap up and then be able to relax and enjoy Warhammer when I’m in the mood for it without that nagging feeling of “I *should* be playing this game more since I’m paying for it.” That’s the route I took with LOTRO and I’m really, really content with that decision.

I’ve got a few weeks to decide what to do. But I have both LOTRO and EQ2 expansions pre-ordered. Maybe I’ll let Moria languish for a while and play EQ2 and WAR together for a month or two, then dive into Moria.

I jumped back into this again, just for a few moments. Which turned into an hour and a half.

Servers are up finally, and load times are way way down, so as I suspected in my last post it looks like the game was phoning home for some reason and slowing down load times.

I re-ran the level that I got 37% in yesterday and got up to 50%. Still lots of hidden goodies! Then played through a few more levels, finishing the first “section” which unlocked more modes. Tons more fun tonight than last night, with jet packs and hazards and getting flung all over the place.

I downloaded my first user-created level. The bad: it took a bit for it to download. Not, y’know, 15 minutes, but maybe 3-4, which is a long time when you might get total junk. Also, in a way it made it apparent that Trophies will be pretty easy to farm in this game, since the level had a little treasure room that I got a 50X score multiplier in.

The good… it was a simple but fun level that had me laughing out loud the first time I played it. And of course I’ve forgotten the name of it, but I “Hearted” it so if you friend me (Dragonchasers is my PSN name) I think you can see what I’ve ‘Hearted’. Now what I love tonight I might think is mediocre after I explore more, so keep that in mind.

All in all, I’m totally sold. This is as great a toy as I’d hoped it would be. I imagine it’ll also be a cash cow for Sony… I’d be really surprised if they didn’t offer weekly DLC packs (I’m thinking $1-$2 packs with a bunch of items and stickers).

Rick and I have been having a bit of a (civil) brawl over at his blog. The topic is PvE in Warhammer. The nice thing about a back and forth with a smart, lucid guy like Rick is that it gets you to thinking.

My basic “problem” with PvE right now is basically lack of population doing it. Running the solo quests isn’t a problem, but doing group-based quests (essentially, Public Quests) can be really hit or miss insofar as finding other people interested in joining forces.

Anyway, jumping right in, and I don’t claim any of these as original ideas; I’m sure other, smarter people have already considered them.

1) Summoning Stones and a PQ Queue: Scenarios are popular (in part) because they’re convenient. What if Mythic put in a PQ Queue? You click a button to enter a queue for some or all PQs in your level range, then you go about your business. Once there are enough people in queue for a PQ, everyone gets teleported to a Summoning Stone near that PQ area, already grouped up and ready to fight. PQ’s wouldn’t be instanced; you could still get to them the old-fashioned way. This would just be an alternate and convenient method of getting into a PQ group without having to run back and forth across the world looking for groups.

2) Checking Open Groups from the map: How would it be if you could open the map, hover over a region and get a list of all the Open Groups active in that region? You could then join one of those groups and head to them. One of the frustrations now is that you might be in Region A, lonely and unloved, while there’s a Warband pwning PQs in Region B and you’d never know about it. This idea would require more Flight Masters though. As it is now, by the time you get to another region the Open Group might have broken up. (This idea could also help LakeRvR.)

3) Checking for Open Groups while in a group: So you’ve been there. You’re in a group, you’ve run a PQ a few times. You want to go to another PQ. But is anyone doing it? How do you check? You can’t. You have to quit the group you’re in, look, then if you come up empty, rejoin the group and keep grinding the current PQ. This idea is more a convenience than anything, but when three or four people want to do another PQ it’d be nice if you could just say, in the current Open Group, “Hey, I see there’s a group of 5 doing the next PQ over. We could switch over to that.”

So there you have it, my contribution to the idea gene pool. Rick’s point is that the only thing wrong with PvE is that people aren’t organized. I agree with him to a certain extent. Presumably people *are* out there somewhere doing it. They’re just not responding in /region chat and they’re in Open Groups that I can’t see from where I am.

Last night I logged in to find a Warband of 2 full groups doing a PQ. I quickly joined them, finished the current ‘run’ and then we did another. And then the group dissolved. Where’d they all go? Unknown. Three of us moved to another PQ in the same chapter and the rest of the night was spent calling out over /region for helpers, and not getting any bites. Maybe everyone had gone to another Pairing? Maybe everyone had logged off? There’s just no easy way to tell, given the tools we currently have.

Witching Night begins tonight, which is gonna mix PvE with LakeRvR, and I’m excited to see what impact that has on doing pure PvE PQs.

Feel free to add to the GroupThink by listing your ideas to help PvE in the comments below.

Amazon finally delivered my copy of LittleBigPlanet today. I only got an hour or so with it, so the usual huge caveats apply…this isn’t a review or even an in-depth first look.

Bad stuff first: the online servers are borked. Trying to upload a high score (which happens automatically) fails, and there are other times where I *think* (hope?) the game is trying to call home and can’t. The reason I say I hope so is that the level loading times are just awful. The screen actually will freeze for long seconds before going back to an animated “loading” state, and I’m hoping again that this has something to do with the online servers. I should’ve tried logging out of PSN and trying again.

Once you’re actually *playing* the game though…it’s just a joy. Pretty much exactly what you think it would be… a physics-based platformer. The first couple levels (that’s all I did) are a mix of tutorials and gameplay. They’re very easy to complete, but getting all the hidden goodies on level 2 won’t be easy. I snagged 100% of the items on level 1 but only 37% on level 2.

The ‘marionette’ system is really neat. Turning the controller makes you sack dude (or dudette) turn its head. Holding a shoulder button lets you control the corresponding arm with the analog sticks. So you can turn and point and wave your arms around..it’s pretty cute (though has no impact on gameplay). And there’s all the dressing up and decorating that you’ve seen in all the videos.

The presentation is superb, with Stephen Fry narrating, a great (and now Qur’an free, I suppose) soundtrack and those super sharp visuals you’ve already seen.

Now all that said… I’m not sure its a game I’ll sit and play for hour upon hour. I think its going to be more of casual “drop in and play a level or two” kind of game for me. But we’ll see. I just think at this stage in my gaming life I’m more interesting in compelling narrative than in just completing levels. That’s not really a flaw of the game though.

Oh, and I’m guessing this will be an absolute blast in multiplayer!