Month: May 2010

Disturbed sleep. Thanks, RDR

Posted on by Nimgimli

I didn’t sleep well last night. I had disturbing, unhappy dreams. I suspected I would, so maybe I sub-consciously caused them to happen.

But I’m still blaming Red Dead Redemption. Something happened in the game last night that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand out. There were only a few second of fore-shadowing that something was Wrong. Not enough for me to prepare myself. And then, there it was.

And I was totally creeped out. After I quit playing the imagery and the event stuck with me; I couldn’t shake it.

This relates a bit to my last role-play post. I think 95% of people will bounce right over this event without a second thought, but I was so “in the world” that I bought into it hook, line and sinker.

I am role-play

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you know me at all, you probably don’t even remotely think of me as a role-player. I never sat around a table playing D&D, and in MMOs I’m pretty quiet as a general rule. I tend to keep to my own company, in games and in ‘real life’ as well.

But the truth is, I’m a pretty hardcore role-player. I just never externalize it.

What spurred (ha! watch this) this self-revelation was playing Red Dead Redemption last night. I’d been riding a horse that was divinely gifted to me (aka I saved my game while horseless and suddenly an equine companion appeared). These magic horses are better than walking it, but they’re not too fast. So I decided to get myself a better horse.

I rode up north of Armadillo where I knew there was a herd of wild horses. I choose one that seemed pretty fast. Really I can’t tell how fast they are, but in my mind’s eye, this beautiful mare seemed faster than the rest. I went after her. I was still fumbling with the lasso controls so it took me a long time to rope her. [The (now obvious to me) trick is to keep the left trigger held down… as soon as you let it up you ‘release’ the lasso and your quarry gets free.] I chased her all over the area. She almost got away a few times but eventually I got a rope around her neck and managed to break her. She settled down nicely, I gave her a reassuring pat on the neck.

At that point, I spotted some herbs, so I climbed down and picked them. When I looked up, it dawned on me that I now had two horses. My old faithful companion who wasn’t too fast, and this new speedy wild mare. I whistled and old faithful came running up. This horse had been with me a long time. He was loyal enough that he followed me around like a puppy. What was I to do with him?

I needed the faster horse, though. I climbed up on the mare and looked at my old companion, standing at the ready. Loyal as always, waiting to serve his master. Maybe get an apple as a reward.

I thought maybe I could lead him back to town. I took out my lasso and tossed it at him and missed. The lasso spooked him and he tore off across the prairie. I watched him go, a little bit relieved that he was no longer a problem, but a little bit worried about what would happen to him.

Then I chuckled at myself for being so silly… what would happened to him is that he’d de-spawn as soon as I left the area, of course. I headed back to town on my new horse..but still couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d betrayed a loyal companion. I found myself wishing Rockstar had given us a way to stable horses, or even to give them to a good home. I’m sure Miss MacFarlane would have room in her stables for a loyal, trustworthy steed!

So that’s my style of role-playing. Sometimes I wish I could turn it off, but I just can’t, even when I want to. It’s why I can’t often bring myself to play ‘evil’ in games; that feeling of malice clings to me long after I stop playing if I’m at all immersed in a game. If the game has anything to hang a role-play hook on, I stick to following my moral compass as much as possible.

Another reason I solo MMOs

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yes! It’s yet another solo players and MMOs post! I’m gonna talk about something a little different this morning though.

So I’m playing Red Dead Redemption lately. Liking it a lot, but there are a few systems that are a bit wonky. Horses, for instance. Horses have various speeds as well as a loyalty stat. As you bond with a horse it becomes more loyal and gains stamina. That’s all well and good but… it’s really hard to tell horses apart. There’s no way to examine a horse to see if he’s yours, or how fast (or loyal) he is, and if your horse gets killed the next time you load (or save) a game you’ll magically have a horse again. The same horse? No, I don’t think so. But what horse is this? There’s no way to tell.

I’d love to see Rockstar re-write the ‘horse system’ to make it a bit more robust. Letting us name our horse would be a start, and letting us examine one to estimate how fast it is would be great too. Heck they could even make that some kind of skill you can learn. How many times has someone in a Western said of another character “That man knows his horses”?

If Red Dead Redemption were an MMO, I’d suggest these changes in the game’s forums or even via in-game tools, and I think a lot of other players would too. We’d have a reasonable chance of having the horse system get a revamp at some point over the years that the game’s “Live Team” worked on it.

It’s remotely possible that Rockstar will re-do the horse system in DLC for RDR, but such a sweeping change isn’t really likely. With the game having a shelf-life of a year or so, it just wouldn’t be worth them devoting the resources to a new horse system (and while I’m using horses as an example, there’re other systems that could really shine with an overhaul).

And that’s another reason I play MMOs even though I’m very much a soloer. MMOs evolve over time, generally improving (though for every change, there’s someone that sees it as a bad thing) or expanding. There’s always new content coming. And at least hope for improvements that you’d like to see.

As someone who has been playing MMOs for years and years, playing RDR is riddled with little pockets of disappointment as I go through a cycle of thinking to myself: “Oh, this feature is a little weak…maybe they’ll improve it in a patch.” followed by, for the umpteenth time, the recollection that I’m not playing an MMO and there’s not a great likelihood of big changes coming to the game. What I’m playing is what I’ll always be playing, and that makes me a little sad.

[Please don’t infer from this post that RDR is a bad game…I like it a LOT. If you’re considering it, I encourage you to give it a try. No game is perfect and I, as a player and armchair developer, am always thinking of ways every game I play can be improved.]

Holy Grail Redemption

Posted on by Nimgimli

Back in the day I played quite a bit of GTA IV, in spite of the fact that I don’t generally like playing bad guys. I tried to keep Niko on the straight and narrow but there were some scripted actions that were very unsavory to me. But I played because of the format.

This past week I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption. I’m loving it. Being a gunslinger in the Old West isn’t nearly as unpalatable to me as being a hit man in a realistic modern setting. And I’ve got a certain amount of nostalgia for Westerns anyway. Rockstar was brilliant in picking the setting… the tail end of the untamed west period, where we see influences of the much more modern eastern states. Some early cars and so forth.

Anyway, what keeps me playing RDR is, again, the format. I play it like an MMO (but then I play everything like an MMO if I can manage to). Sometimes I quest, sometimes I chase challenges (gather 5 coyote hides, shoot 5 birds), sometimes I just ride the range to see what me and my trusty steed come upon.

In a lot of ways, Red Dead Redemption is the best RPG I’ve played in a long time, in the most literal sense of the acronym. No, there aren’t levels or character stats (though there is gear, to some extent) but I just sink into the role of John Marsten and lose myself.

But as much as I like Westerns, I’m a fantasy guy at heart. I know everyone else is sick to death of fantasy, but I’m not.

And that’s why I want Rockstar’s next game to use this open world format for an Arthurian Grail Quest game. Imagine you play a knight. You might be a white knight or a black knight. You’re ultimately searching for the Grail, but along the way you could have all kinds of adventures. You could help out peasants who’re being mistreated by a cruel lord… or side with the lord to help him keep those pesky peasants in line. Hunting and fishing, of course.. a knight has to live off the land at times. Magical beasts, just to keep things fun. Random encounters with wizards, damsels, other knights, creatures… and this is Rockstar, so there’ll be some very dark things happening, too.

I could just get lost in a world like that… but I’m sure that’s much to geeky for Rockstar to take on. I hope someone ‘borrows’ this open world format and runs with it, though.

Playing with fonts

Posted on by Nimgimli

Google announced a new Font API for the web today. I found the idea intriguing. The problem is, I’m so so SO not a designer. I shouldn’t be allowed within 100 yards of a font.

But the geek in me had to try it. Not every browser is supported, but if yours is, you’re looking at ‘Molengo’ for the body of posts, and ‘Vollkorn’ for the titles. When you load the page, your browser is loading the font off of Google’s api servers. On a slow connection you might see an annoying flash as the font loads in…sorry about that. There’s a more sophisticated way to use them but I’m just screwing around, so…

There’re 18 fonts available initially, and you can see the list here. And Google has a nice primer up on how to implement them; it’s dead easy.

A farewell to LOTRO, and other musings

Posted on by Nimgimli

I took some time tonight to pack up my housing items in LOTRO. It’s silly for me to log in every 5 or so weeks to pay 55 silver/week rent to keep the house. I just don’t have time to play MMOs anymore, and don’t see that changing while I’m working two jobs. I have a Lifetime sub to LOTRO so I can still pop in and dabble when I do find a few spare minutes, but for now it’s a game, not a world. I don’t need a house in a game. I need houses in worlds.

I have to confess, it all felt really melancholy. I miss the days of escaping to another world, a virtual world. But those days have passed me by in a number of ways. There’s my personal situation: no time and all that. But today’s MMOs just seem to be games and not worlds. EVE is the only exception that I really know about, and damn would I love to have the free time needed to play EVE seriously.

Packing up my LOTRO house had me thinking back to our guild halls and my houses in Ultima Online. That was a real world, at least to me and my guildies. There was a society in that game. There were good people and bad people. There was a dynamic economy. Towns sprang up and faded away over time. Inns would appear and be the ‘in’ (ha! See what I did there?) place to hang out for a while, until they went out of fashion and some new place sprang up.

We’d hang out, throw parties, do battle, make alliances, corner markets, have weddings… we did all kinds of things back then. It was more than a game, it was a place.

Back then, cyberspace was coming, and my then-girlfriend and I would kid about being an elderly couple sitting on the front porch in rocking chairs, jacked in via implants. But cyberspace fizzled, the same way virtual reality and the space program did. Cyberspace seemed like it’d become a place. But that never happened and now the very term seems silly.

I also saw that the beta for WOW Cataclysm is coming soon, or maybe has even started. That has me wanting to reinstall WOW to take one last look at those places where I used to hang out so much, before Blizzard plows them under to build anew.

But then I realized, you can’t go home again. Sitting out in Westfall in the wee hours, chatting with friends, having a beer or three in real life while I did so, watching the lighthouse’s beam sweep across the sea… if I went back now, it wouldn’t be the same as what it was; it’d just be depressing. Like when I go to visit my mom in my home town and pop into my old haunts and realize I’m just another tourist weekending in The Hamptons. I’m not the only one who moved on, and there’s no longer a “there” there.

Anyway, enough of being maudlin.

So LOTRO is packed away. Life is crazy hectic and unpleasant. And I keep buying (mostly single player) games. I mentioned this on Twitter today and got a few people who said they do the same thing. The busier I get, the more games I buy. Not the more games I play, mind you. I get them home, find 20 minutes to tear off the shrinkwrap and fire them up, then never get back to them.

So why do I keep buying them? I guess it’s the only way I have to feel connected to this hobby that used to be such a huge part of my life. I want to play, but can’t. Somehow the retail therapy of buying a new game scratches that itch for a few moments. I bought Monster Hunter Tri the week it came out. Played it once. 3D Dot Heroes this week. Booted it up, looked at it, haven’t had time to go back. Red Dead Redemption is coming next week. Bought the Humble Bundle of Indie games and never even got around to downloading it. Bought the Civ IV collection from Steam last night…those I did install but never booted up. And so on and on… so much wasted money!

The one bright spot right now is the iPad. I’m still playing that silly Godfinger game; it’s something I can spend 5 minutes on 3 times a day and feel like I’m making some progress, though towards what, I don’t know. When I hit level 50 I’ll just stop playing probably. Ditto We Rule. Log in a few times a day for 2-3 minutes…it’s a nice break. And a bunch of other simple fun games that I can play for a couple minutes in bed before lights out.

This patch will ease up eventually. I took the whole week of E3 off, to follow all the news and to recharge my batteries. So that, at least, I have to look forward to. And come hell or high water I’m going to find some time for Red Dead Redemption next week! I’m about at the limit of what I’m willing to do for my day job. We’ve all been doing ~12 hour days for a couple weeks (and then I have my blogging job once that’s done) and at this point it’s just starting to feel like management is taking advantage of us. Getting through an unexpected crunch is one thing, but those can’t be permanent hours (at least not without a juicy raise or some fat bonuses!)

Anyway, that’s what’s going on at Dragonchasers HQ. If you’re someone I used to chat with on Twitter or in blog comments, please forgive my disappearance. It just can’t be helped. I do miss my social networking chums, though. Hope everyone is doing well out there!