OnLive first look

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve had nothing but snarky comments for OnLive since it was first announced. See The Emperor Has No Clothes! (OnLive), OnLive, a new game-changing technology or OnLive’s streaming game service to launch June 17th. I don’t expect you to go read all those, but if you did, you’d find that I slipped in a virtual sneer at every chance I got.

I was absolutely positive this service was snake oil.

Tonight I got in and… dammit, it works pretty well. I’m gonna have to eat my words.

Tonight I’m just going to convey my experience with a game; there’s a lot to talk about re: social aspects of the service but I’ll leave that for another day.

I selected Borderlands as the first game to try, partially because Scopique chose it (and I wanted to compare notes) and partially because I just wanted to play it. I haven’t played Borderlands on PC before and only a bit on the 360.

I fired it up and more or less instantly was seeing the intro stuff. You get 30 minutes of demo time per game, but otherwise a demo is the full game, and that includes intro movies, tutorials and stuff. That’s a slight flaw and in a perfect world they’d start your timer when you got control of your character, but I realize that’s asking a lot.

The game ran pretty nicely. One weird thing was when I aimed my gun, distant terrain and enemies would be blurry and then come into focus. I don’t know if this is an OnLive artifact or a style choice. It didn’t feel wrong…in fact it felt pretty neat. Like I’m raising my gun and squinting down the sights to focus on a target.

A very few times things went slightly wonky and I’d suddenly turn 180 degrees or something. This didn’t happen enough that it hurt the experience, but it’s worth mentioning. Presumably the OnLive servers aren’t packed yet.

So I ran around killing stuff, finished a few quests, made a level, then my demo ran out. So now I had a choice to make. In the case of Borderlands, I could buy a “Full Pass” for $29.99 and have full access to the game for as long as I was subscribed to OnLive (that’s the same price I’d pay to just buy the game from Steam) or I could buy a 5 day pass ($8.99) or a 3 day pass ($5.99). So there are options, at least for Borderlands.

On the other hand, Assassin’s Creed II was $39.99 for a Full Pass (again, same as Steam) and had no short term rentals, but Batman Arkham Asylum only had 3 & 5 day passes ($4.99 & $6.99 respectively) with no Full Pass option. Splinter Cell Conviction was $59.99 for a Full Pass, no other options.

Point being every game is different. Scopique played some demos where you could save your progress and pick right up from where you left off if you bought the game, but Borderlands, when the demo ran out, let me know that my progress wasn’t saved. It’d be nice to know this ahead of time.

There’s no way I’d pay $60 for Splinter Cell Conviction on this service, but I could see myself buying a 3-day pass to Batman some weekend, if I didn’t already own the game on the PS3. Or even a 3-day pass to Borderlands if some friends were playing some weekend.

I feel like I’m focusing too much on the negatives here. The fact is, I was *stunned* that the service works. It was really nice jumping into a game without have to download or install anything (once the OnLive client was installed, that is). While I was playing, Angela was in EQ2 and she didn’t notice any lag caused by my OnLive-ing, which was something I was concerned about.

And my PC is decent for gaming, but pretty much every game kicks the video card’s fan into high gear, making the PC suddenly start sounding like a vacuum cleaner. That didn’t happen playing OnLive, since my PC wasn’t doing the heavy lifting. And if you have a snappy internet connection but not such a great PC, OnLive should in theory be right up your alley.

With their special offer, the first year of OnLive is free, and I’ll definitely be using it at least now and then. Year 2 it’ll cost $4.95/month; we’ll see if I’m up for that. After that the intent is for it to go to $14.95/month and I’m pretty sure I would not do that, unless it came with some kind of perks (certain games free each month or something along those lines).

There’s a bunch of social stuff that I’ll go into more in another post if people are interested, but suffice to say it’s kind of fun watching other people play games now and then.

If you try out OnLive, add me as a friend: my gamertag there is Jaded (same as it is on Xbox Live).

APB Review Embargo: What kind of a message are they sending?

Posted on by Nimgimli

First, I should state that I’ve dabbled in the beta of APB. I got into the closed beta the night before it ended, and I’m in the current short-term beta, though haven’t had a lot of time to play. I’m under NDA (I think? RPS implies it has been lifted. I didn’t really play enough to speak intelligently about the game in any case.) so can’t get into specifics, but suffice to say that based on a total of maybe 1 hour of playing the beta, I was considering pre-ordering the game. I certainly hadn’t made up my mind to do it, but I was rolling the idea around in my head.

Then this news of a review embargo came out. According to Rock, Papers, Shotgun, Realtime Worlds is attempting to impose a review embargo until a week after launch. It’s a ludicrous thing to attempt, telling someone they can’t talk about a game they bought until a week later.

But besides being dumb and unenforceable, it’s horrible marketing. As soon as I read this I made up my mind NOT to pre-order APB. If Realtime Worlds has so little confidence in their product, I certainly am not going to risk my $50.

I have to assume they ran the numbers and decided that they’d lose more business to early bad reviews than to sending loss-of-confidence marketing messages, but I think in the end they’ll lose in both ways. There’s no reason for a publication to adhere to their request: this isn’t EA or Activision where the company can use other IPs as leverage to enforce their will (and even so, that’d be abhorrent behavior). So reviews are still going to come out when pubs have done due diligence in playing. If those reviews are bad, it’ll hurt sales. In addition to that, folks like me are going to shy away due to this marketing message.

I can’t understand what they were thinking.

I enjoyed my short time in APB. My reservations were built around trying to understand why there was a subscription model attached to it, and trying to decide if it was something I’d enjoy over a long period. But now I can only think I missed some major short-comings in my time playing. So I’ll wait and see what the reviews say.

[UPDATE: Realtime Worlds has responded to Rock, Paper, Shotgun with an explanation. Basically it boils down to them not wanting reviewers to review the game based on the current “Keys to the City” beta event. Fair enough, but if that’s what you’re asking, ask it. Don’t try to deliver an ultimatum in the form of an embargo. Thanks to Brent for bringing this to my attention!]

They’re handing out winter jackets in hell: I’m interested in SW:TOR

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m not a much of a Star Wars fan. Sure, I saw all the movies and I’ve read a few of the books, but I don’t obsess over either. I think I own, somewhere, the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD, still in the shrinkwrap. Bought because it seemed like something I ought to own.

I was the one person I know who didn’t like KOTOR when it came out. I played it, because it was an Important Game at the time, but I didn’t think much of it. I played Star Wars Galaxies too, because I try almost every MMO that comes out (well, I did back when only a few came out every year…I guess these days I can no longer claim to try them all).

Y’know, I love fantasy, and I love sci-fi. But sci-fantasy just doesn’t do too much for me. Take The Force out of Star Wars and make it pure space opera and I’d like it a lot more.

Anyway… because of all this, Star Wars: The Old Republic wasn’t an automatic win for me. I know for many, the IP is draw enough. Not for me. And all the fuss about full-voice to me is a detriment, if anything. EQ2 has more voice than any other MMO I play and I find it gets really tedious. I read the text and skip the voice.

And then there was the Bioware hype, implying that this was an MMO that broke all the molds and took the genre in a new direction. I’m not interested in the MMO genre going in a new direction. I like today’s MMOs.

So yeah, SW:TOR wasn’t on my radar.

Then yesterday I watched a lot of footage from the game, and suddenly I’m excited about it! And ironically the reason I’m excited is… it looks just like any other MMO! The HUD was understandable and the quests were pretty typical Kill Ten Rats (ok, Kill 10 Berserk Troopers). The combat looked really fun; more City of Heroes than Everquest (meaning it looked a bit more active than old-school MMOs). The graphics were a nice balance between realism and animation and seemed very clean. Lots of ranged combat, which I enjoy. You killed stuff and got look from their corpses… I love me some monster piñatas!

So now I’m on-board, but I wonder if others who’re looking forward to Bioware’s MMO paradigm shift will wind up disappointed? Right now the Bio-dudes are saying Spring 2011 launch, so we’ll know before too long, I guess.

I couldn’t find real gameplay video, but here’s a ‘cinematic’ look at the game. No HUD, camera angles jumping around for dramatic effect. When talking to the NPC at the end, think about how long it takes him to say what he has to say, then imagine standing around like that for hundreds of quests…

Update: Gameplay! (Skip the first half or so)

PC Games – E3 2010 – Star Wars: The Old Republic

Why do gamers hate games?

Posted on by Nimgimli

So E3 is here and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s my favorite holiday! (It is too a holiday, at least at my house!) I’ve been a gamer all my life, first kid’s board games, then paper and cardboard wargames, and then they went and invented personal computers and video game consoles and arcades and… damn! Amazing stuff.

I love games!

At the same time, I know people who hate games. They see them as mind-rotting wastes of time, or hopelessly geeky, or in some way harmful to our psyches. These people stay far away from games and when they do have something to say about games, it’s something negative. I understand where they’re coming from. I don’t agree with them, but they at least make sense.

But then there’s this huge group of people who play games, but hate them. E3 comes around and they immediately start responding to every piece of content with snark or condescension or disgust. They (apparently) hate everything they see. And yet they play games.

I just don’t get it. People with other interests don’t do this. Golfers don’t talk about how much golf sucks. Stamp collectors don’t think stamps are all lame. Yachtsmen don’t hate boats. Knitters don’t curse the existence of sheep. So why are so many gamers driven to talk disparagingly about their hobby?

For years, video and computer gaming was something that you did in private. For the most part, you wouldn’t share the fact that you were a gamer when you were at a dinner party or something. If you did you’d get some very curious looks, indeed. We weren’t exactly ashamed of being gamers, but we didn’t broadcast it either.

Sometimes I wonder if this snark-attitude is a remnant of those days? If we talk disparagingly about every new game we see, we think we’re somehow holding ourselves a little bit apart from that ‘gamer stigma’ and hope non-gamers will take us more seriously?

I just don’t understand it, and it disappoints me. I keep looking for kindred spirits to share the joy of gaming with, and I find very few. And there are times when I’m right down there being as snarky and condescending as everyone else; I don’t understand myself very well, either. Hopefully I’ll re-read this post when I’m in one of those snark phases and will be able to examine my motives then. Right now I can’t imagine what I’m thinking at times like those.

Games are just games. If they drive you to generate all kinds of negative energy about them, it’s probably time to take a step back and find something else to do with your free time. Something that will have a positive impact on your life. Hopefully I’ll take that advice to heart the next time I visit SnarkVille.

Role-reversal: EQ2 and the end of domestic bliss

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night I was in EQ2 again, playing my newbie Fury (who is now 22). Angela was on her 24 Troubadour.

This Fury is the first healer I’ve played. Generally I gravitate towards DPS classes. Angela generally plays healer types.

Now would be a good time to admit that we’ve encountered some friction playing EQ2 together in the past. She knows the game far, far better than I do, but my male ego has trouble accepting that fact. She tends to be very helpful which I tend to hear as her being patronizing. It makes sense that she be in the lead when we’re together, but I make a lousy follower. Mind you, it isn’t like we get into yelling arguments or anything, but there’s a reason we often play different MMOs. 🙂

So back to last night. I was waiting for a named to spawn and she logged in her Troubadour to come make sure I was in the right spot. I knew I was in the right spot but she always assumes I’m lost in EQ2, and about 90% of the time she’s right. She has some add-on map module that shows Points of Interest provided by the community so she wanted to double check that I was at the mob’s spawn point.

Of course, I was in the right spot /smugsmile but as long as she was there, we decided to group up. Now, if you haven’t played New Halas you might not understand just how easy the zone is. I’m almost finished and I’ve never been below 3/4ers health, always playing solo up to now. It’s really one long tutorial with no combat-challenge to it at all, assuming you do all the quests (which will keep you comfortably leveled up so you’re always doing green/blue quests).

And now we were grouped, a 22 & a 24, doing quests that were easily done solo by the 22.

Had you been a fly on the wall, you probably would’ve been very amused. First, I kept running headlong at baddies and dumping my DoTs on them, immediately getting 100% aggro, until her Troubadour engaged, which would normally pull aggro off me. This would frustrate me since I’m used to her being the healer and so used to doing everything I can to keep mobs off her. And she kept reminding me “Don’t forget to heal me!” even though her health never dipped below about 90% without me ever touching my heals.

It was so clear we were both in the opposite roles we’re normally in… me charging into fight after fight, doing damage as quickly as possible. Her fretting about the group having enough healing when no healing was needed. Both of us getting stressed out and a tiny bit annoyed with each other, even though we were rolling over mobs and finishing quests without breaking the slightest hint of a sweat.

I had to laugh, after the fact.

We’re going to have to find someplace more challenging to fight, and we’re going to have to do it soon if I’m going to learn to break my “First into the breach” habits and develop the pattern of staying in the back debuffing, healing, and dropping DoTs after she’s gotten aggro.

It just amused me how we slip into familiar patterns, regardless of the class we play.

I’m finally to where I got a quest that leads me into the actual city of New Halas. My inventory is bursting at the seams with house items I’ve got from quests, as well as discarded items that I’ve been saving for tinkering or whatever its called (no idea if any of it will be of use for that).

I still think the Sarnak starter area (I always forget the name of it) is my favorite so far, but the Sarnak city is a major PITA to navigate around.

Back to EQ2?

Posted on by Nimgimli

On any given Saturday night, there’s a very good chance that Angela will be playing EQ2, and a pretty good chance she’ll be doing some quest with a bunch of old and dear friends of mine. Folks I played Ultima Online with, just to give an idea of how far back we go.

EQ2 never really ‘sticks’ with me but between a desire to reconnect with these old chums, and curiosity about the New Halas starting area, I re-subbed. Paradoxically I created a new character (since that bunch is all level-capped so the only way for me to join up with them is to get a character to cap, too). I chose a Barbarian Fury, which I’m told is a kind of offensive healer.

So, between about 11 pm Saturday night and 11 pm Sunday night, I managed 18 levels in New Halas. This is without any kind of ‘experience buffing’ and I’m not talking 24 hours of game play. A couple hours Saturday night, a couple Sunday morning, then a few more Sunday evening. That felt crazy fast to me!!

So far I have mixed feelings about New Halas. There’s still an awful lot of travel back and forth and quest hubs so far have lasted too long. I get pretty bored with an area before I’m sent on to the next. I do like the theme; early on you’re helping pilgrims ready themselves for the trip to New Halas, then later you’re involved in an epic and eternal struggle between blue dwarves (Coldain??) and orcs. Fun stuff, in that noob-ish way.

But don’t you hate it when you get sent to an area to kill level 10 mobs and see some level 12 mobs standing around, or an object that stands out, and you just KNOW that as soon as you go back to turn in a quest, you’ll be sent back to the same spot to fight those level 12 mobs or interact with that unusual object? That happens over and over again in New Halas.

As for the Fury, had I designed the class I would’ve turned its progression on its head. At level 18 I still have 2 direct damage spells and 1 debuff. I have plenty of buffs, and a vast array of heals that I never have reason to use. Angela tells me Furies get a lot more attack spells later on.

Since most new characters don’t bother (or need) to party, and early quests don’t require much (or any) healing thanks to constant ‘mini-dings’ it seems like an odd decision to front load the class with healing, cure, and resurrection spells. Honestly by Sunday night I was pretty damned bored of Heroic Opportunity/Deadly Swarm/Tempest over and over again. (Just to be clear, I’ve gotten upgrades, so really it’s something liked Deadly Swarm III/Tempest II, but as I swap these in, the key strokes don’t change.) Give us the attack spells early, and add healing spells when we’re high enough level to require healing and/or grouping!

I also still have not hit the city. I have had access to venders and a bank, but I have 3-4 collections that need turning in and a bunch of house items I’ve earned that I’d love to put in a house. I know I *could* just go to New Halas but I’m kind of playing it deliberately ignorant and just going where the quest chains aim me.

For all this grumping, I’m happy enough to be back playing. One thing about EQ2 is that returning to it is always very easy for me. I’ll have to re-acquaint myself with what all the skills/spells do, sure, but the mechanics are as familiar as an old shoe.

I’ll probably finish out New Halas then jump back over to my level 50-ish Berserker and see what I can do about getting him somewhere towards level cap. Unless the Fury gets a bit more Furious. Don’t get me wrong, the class isn’t weak, it just feels like every combat has me doing the exact same keystrokes. That isn’t true with the ‘zerker, but of course he has over twice the levels worth of skills.

We’ll see how long I last this time around. Maybe I’ll buy one of those $25 mounts just to drive @Longasc crazy. 🙂

Print is dead (to me)

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I bought an iPad back in April. I believe tomorrow is my 2 month iPad anniversary.

I love the thing. In principal I hate how closed iTunes is, but in practice I never find myself longing for something I can’t get. Basically I focus on what the iPad can do, and don’t worry about what it can’t. The iPad was additive with regards to my life…I didn’t sacrifice anything for it. I didn’t trade in my laptop or my netbook for the iPad, so yeah, I focus on what it can do today, while we wait for the Android competition to heat up. I’m looking forward to using the tablet that is better than the iPad, whenever and from whomever it comes.

Anyway, one of the things I use it for every day is reading books. I have iBooks (Apple’s books), Kindle and Barnes & Noble book readers on there. Right now I’m chewing through Storm Front, the first Harry Dresden book (which I got for free from B&N via a promotion). Before that it was For The Win and before that a couple of Riverworld books.

I’m looking at the stack of print books sitting next to my bedside table and find myself not wanting to open them up. I’m thinking about re-purchasing these books in e-book format. I’m that taken by reading on the iPad (I’m sure I’d feel the same about the Kindle or Nook, too).

My eyes aren’t that good. I really need to get new glasses but my job doesn’t offer vision coverage and I never seem to have the extra couple hundred $$ that it’ll cost me. With the iPad, I bump up the font. If I’m out and about and don’t have any glasses with me, I bump it up really huge. When I’m reading in bed at the end of the day, I wear my not-really-strong-enough glasses and bump the font up a medium amount. And turn the brightness on the iPad way down.

Since I always have the iPad handy, I always have my book handy. I really like that. And I always have the web handy in the event I want to quickly look something up. And I never lose my place.

I love my books but now I’m feeling this weird conflict. I don’t want to give up my shelves and shelves of books. Or the smell of an older book. And yet, I don’t really want to go back to reading tiny print on paper, either.

Same goes for magazines. I haven’t opened a print magazine since I got the iPad. I read articles on the web now.

It’s really a strange feeling. Like my world has shifted a tiny bit.

Doctorow’s For The Win is full of fun ideas

Posted on by Nimgimli

I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s For The Win last night. I wanted to talk a little bit about it, because Doctorow has some ideas about the future of MMO gaming that I found pretty interesting.

If you haven’t heard of it, For The Win is a book about a group of gold farmers and other young people fighting to bring about better working conditions for themselves, and for other ‘invisible’ workers who’re treated terribly and work for tiny wages (notably Chinese factory workers). The book couldn’t be more timely with all the Foxconn suicides in the news these days.

The plot of the book itself was ok, but it wasn’t what had me turning pages. What I was really enjoying was glimpsing the future through Doctorow’s eyes. If a specific date for the happenings in the book was mentioned I missed it, but World of Warcraft is considered ancient history (as described by the ~20 year old characters) so I’m going to guess the year is 2025 or thereabouts. Also a lot of the book takes place in Mumbai & Shenzhen, two places which would be totally foreign to me today, being an untraveled Westerner.

So there are a lot of MMOs running in this future world. Four are mentioned often. One is Mushroom Kingdom, run by Nintendo. The other three are all run by Coca-Cola! Implied but not seen are other games run by companies that we don’t think of as gaming companies today. In the future, as now, gold farming isn’t legal, but there isn’t a lot the companies can do to stop it. There are “Pinkertons” running around in games to kill gold farmers (all worlds seem to be full PvP in the future) but they aren’t paid by the companies normally.

In this way For The Win feels a bit retro. Reminded me of Ultima Online with the PKK guilds trying to maintain order.

Most of the gold farmers work for mobsters stationed in India, China or Indonesia. Farming is big business and the games have gotten so big that there are people who really know nothing about the games but who make a living out of investing in virtual goods. The bosses drive their workers relentlessly at times when a particular item is selling for a lot.

Anyway, it’s a fun read, my biggest problem with it is that it makes gold farming sound fun (I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek). These gold farmers don’t stand around in a field alone killing trash mobs over and over. Instead they farm instances, both for the gold and for items. Generally they work in a PC bang together, shouting back and forth between terminals. They tend to be very good players rather than the rather mindless semi-bots that our real gold farmers seem to be today.

So let’s get to some of the ideas I thought were interesting. First, one of the games is called Zombie Mecha (Mecha Zombie??). In it, players pilot giant robots in a post-zombie apocalypse world. It’s a full-on PVP world with two rival factions, plus the zombies who’re AI controlled. Zombies can’t generally hurt someone in a mech unless it gets damaged or stuck, then they swarm all over it. Tales of battle in Zombie Mecha were really fun and I found myself wanting to play that game!

Second, the games are a lot more ‘complete’ than today’s games are. Most things in-world can be interacted with. Of course the programmers can’t think of everything, so when a player tries to perform an action that there’s no scripting for, the game pulls in a Mechanical Turk to take over. These turks are players who get paid a few cents per interaction. They generally run a bunch of sessions at a time so they’re able to juggle interacting with a bunch of players all at the same time.

I think this is a brilliant idea and one game companies need to incorporate asap. It needn’t be as elaborate as in the book, but imagine if every 50th orc you fought was actually being controlled by a person? How much more interesting could the game become? The person running the orc would have a goal of providing you with an immersive experience, not necessarily beating you. You get a better experience so you keep playing, and someone can make a few dollars while they’re hanging out at home playing games.

The next idea is a technology one. When Coke (in the game) is ready to roll out a new server cluster, they build it in a shipping container. They burn it in at their HQ, then ship it to somewhere very cold, and preferably somewhere near a renewable energy source, like a wind farm or a geo-thermal vent. By using the ambient environment to keep the servers cool, they save a lot of money (and energy). Every so often they rotate out one of these containers to bring it back to HQ for refurbing. This might seem trivial if you’ve never been in a big data center but trust me, those places spend a LOT of money and energy on air conditioning.

I had some more examples but this has run long enough for now. You can download a free electronic copy of For The Win if you don’t feel like paying for it. You might encounter some typos and such, but the (ePub) version I picked was very readable; it isn’t like it’s a first draft or anything.

If you’re an MMO player, you’ll probably get a kick out of the gaming aspects of the book. If you’re concerned about worker’s rights in Asia, then I think you’ll find the tale inspiring. Well worth a read.

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.