The day Diablo 3 broke the Internet

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m in a really lousy mood today, and it’s all because of Diablo 3. Though it isn’t Diablo 3’s fault.

Diablo 3, in case you didn’t know, is a video game. You’d be forgiven if you thought it was a cure for cancer or the key to world peace, because god damned if people aren’t giving it that kind of weight.

I bought it but I only played for 90 minutes or so. My ‘gut’ response was fairly tepid but I’m trying to reserve judgement until I get farther in. I’ll admit I’m one of those curmudgeons who would’ve been happy to pay $60 for Diablo 2 re-skinned with better graphics.

So how’d Diablo 3 break the Internet? Why am I bitching this time? Well, first of all let’s set hyperbole aside. I’m not talking about the entire Internet, I’m talking about the gaming-oriented parts of it. G+ and I assume Twitter, and personal blogs.

But I feel like EVERYONE is mad today. Some people are mad at Blizzard because of the DRM model and/or the fact that the servers are/were down. Some people are mad at the people who are mad at Blizzard. Some people are on very tall seats, pompously chiding the people who are mad at Blizzard. Others are on equally high seats, pompously chiding the people who are mad at the people who are mad at Blizzard. Of course there are people mad at the people on those very tall seats..mad at them for their condescending attitudes. People who bought Diablo 3 are angry, people who didn’t buy Diablo 3 are angry. People (and here’s where I come in) are angry that everyone is angry about a stupid video game!

The game-facing web today is a giant cluster-fuck of bad feelings and ill will, and it’s all because Diablo 3 launched.

It reminds me of a story…

I used to be a bartender in a local-kind of bar in a resort town. One day, Gerry Cooney walked into the bar with a friend. This is long enough ago (mid 1980s) that everyone knew who he was. Conversation almost immediately died down. Cooney sat at the end of the bar, quietly talking to his friend, and had a beer or two. Then they got up, left a nice tip and thanked me, and left the place.

And suddenly the clientele went nuts. Guys swearing that Cooney wasn’t so big and they could take him. Other guys calling bullshit on that, which led to whether or not guy A could even take guy B. Next thing I know I’m trying to manage 3 separate altercations at once. I started ejecting people from the premises left and right… everyone was mad and throwing punches willy-nilly.

Now Gerry Cooney didn’t do anything and carried no blame, but he was still the cause of everyone having a terrible night down at the local pub that night.

Diablo 3 is the Gerry Cooney of the club that consists of my gaming friends on social media and blogs.

I think I’m just going to put my head down and wait for this whole thing to blow over.

First glimpse into The Secret World

Posted on by Nimgimli

So as you probably know, Funcom’s new MMO, The Secret World, is having an NDA-free beta weekend. I got in via a PAX East give-away and I’ve now had a wee bit of time to play. Here’re my thoughts based on the first hour or two of play.

TSW makes a pretty horrible first impression, at least in the beta. Character creation options are very limited (there will be more on release), textures on the characters are just awful (details like laces or decorative medals are just ‘painted on’) and there’s a lot of exposition in the form of NPC monologing in the little prologue (which was apparently crafted for this beta).

Your best bet is to get comfortable and just go along with the prologue in order to get it out of the way asap. Once you leave London and head to New England the game starts to really open up.

TSW uses a classless system and at low levels at least, gameplay is going to be defined by your weapon. I chose a sledgehammer for mine. My first 3 skills were a basic attack which generated a Resource and had the potential to Weaken an enemy; a longer cooldown, more powerful attack that also generated a Resource and could trigger AOE secondary damage if used on a Weakened enemy; and a big cone-shaped AOE attack that consumed all those Resources. The more resources, the more damage. You can hold up to 5 Resources and for a Hammer-wielder they’ll fill by themselves, but doing attacks causes them to fill faster.

Honestly at low levels combat isn’t all that exciting but I think it’ll get more interesting as we get deeper into the game. You’re constantly unlocking Skill Points & Ability Points that you can spend on new skills & abilities, but you can only have 7 Active and 7 Passive Abilities in use at any time (Skills seem to be more generic buffs to particular weapon types). So after a while it’s going to be like Guild Wars where you have to pick and choose from your Abilites in order to develop an effective set (or Deck in the game’s nomenclature).

When you finally get to New England, you’re supposed to be on a small island off the coast somewhere near Maine (one of the NPCs talks about kids going to Bangor for hay rides) but everyone on the island was imported from Queens or Jersey or somewhere like that. If you’re not from New England this might not be as jarring as it was for me, but wow, did the voice acting directory ever get these accents wrong!

But once there, you’re kind of overwhelmed with quests. Quests work differently than they do in most games. Rather than run around and gathering a bunch of kill ten rats quests, you can only work on a single quest at a time, as far as I can tell. There are about half a dozen different types of quests and maybe you can work on one of each kind? Still figuring this bit out.

But I want to tell you the [SPOILERY] story of one quest just to try to illustrate why I’m liking this game so much. The Sheriff of Kingsmouth, which is under attack by zombies, wants you to help set up surveillance cameras. So step one is leaving the safety of the barricades and running around pulling down security cameras from buildings (well almost constantly fighting zombies). The first few are really straight foward… you just right click on them. Then you find one you can’t reach, and you have to find a way to climb onto the roof of the building to get to it (via jumping on boxes around back). Then there’s one really high up. To get to that one you have to climb a ladder to the roof of an adjacent building, then leap across the gap between buildings, only to get the camera and find out its broken. But there’s a note attached to it saying there’re replacements in the basement.

You head into the basement of the building, which turns out to be a solo instance. The janitor in charge of the building has turned into something inhuman, though with his last shred of decency he warns you to stay away and then barricades himself behind a series of booby traps. You need to get to him though, so your next task is figuring out how to avoid the booby traps.

The first few are laser trip-wires that you can just leap over, but then you come to a grid of lasers. You have to enter a side room to turn these off. Inside the side room are security cameras, motion sensitive, which will set off deadly bombs if they detect movement. Suddenly you’re in a stealth game, avoiding the cameras by timing their movements and scurrying from cover to cover. Eventually you come to a switch that’ll turn off the grid of booby traps in the hallway, letting you get a bit further.

Before you get to the janitor you’ll have to walk through a maze of laser beams and do another security camera-avoidance room. When you finally get to him, he attacks, so then you have to kill him. And finally when he’s down, you can collect the last camera. I died 4 times in that darned basement!

But you’re still not done. Now you have to place 4 cameras around the Police Department barricade, avoiding or killing the Ravenous Hordes of zombies while doing so.

Once THAT is done, you head back into the police department and access their computer system to bring the new cameras online. When you do, you can actually access the cameras to see what’s going on out there.

Then FINALLY this minor side quest is finished. It was one of the most elaborate quests I can remember doing in an MMO.

So exploration, combat, jumping puzzles, stealth puzzles, more combat, more exploration, more combat and then some basic computer skills, all required to solve that quest.

I have to admit at first I found the basement to be annoying as heck. MMOs aren’t supposed to make you figure out things like this! But then I made a conscious decision to treat The Secret World as its own thing, not like “another MMO” and I started to really get into it.

I’m probably done for the beta weekend. TSW doesn’t lend itself to being played under time pressure, in my opinion. When you’re playing a weekend beta you tend to want to go through content as rapidly as possible so you can see as much as possible, and The Secret World seems designed to be a game you have to think about, puzzle over…maybe even walk away from now and then. Try to rush through it and it’s just going to be frustrating rather than enjoyable, like trying to rush through an adventure game.

I still have a TON of questions and honestly it doesn’t feel like a game that can get polished up between now and June so I expect a rocky launch, but I really like what Funcom is trying to do here. I’ve pre-ordered; I’m happy to support a company that’s breaking the MMO mold; I can tell you that the chat was full of people taken by surprise and really frustrated that they weren’t being given more explicit instructions, so I think TSW is going to be a niche hit that’s disliked by many MMO vets.

When I gave up on SWTOR I remember saying that I was done with MMOs because there weren’t any good ones coming out any time soon. Now I’m hooked on TERA and excited about both The Secret World and Guild Wars 2. Talk about being spoiled for choice; I guess there’s still life left in the MMO genre!

PS: Sorry no screenshots. I was hitting PrintScrn on the assumption it was taking shots (I wasn’t really paying attention) but as in AoC the screenshot button is F11 or something. Doh!

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 5/11/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

TERA is having more staying power with me than I expected it to, honestly. So another boring wrap-up.

Purchases This Week

Nothing! Wait, I lie… I bought Ascension for the iPad for 99 cents.

Played This Week
Last Friday was our first Guild Wars: Eye of the North session and that prompted me to do a bit more in Guild Wars. About 3.5 hours this week.

I spent half an hour in the Firefall beta before a visit to the game’s forums turned me off the product.

The rest of the week was all about TERA (13 hours of it).

Plans for the Week to Come
Lots of plans. Tonight is Guild Wars: Eye of the North with friends. Monday night, if I get done work in time, is a Guild Wars 2 beta/stress test session. Between those two lies a The Secret World beta weekend.

Then on Tuesday, the juggernaut that is Diablo III launches.

In whatever spare time I can carve out around all these other games, I hope to keep on moving forward in TERA.

Too many great games available at the same time!

Have a good week, everyone!

TERA: Bastion of Lok

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night I finally made it into TERA’s first dungeon, the Bastion of Lok. This is a 5-man instance meant for (I believe) levels 20-24. Our run took a little over an hour (no wipes, a couple bio breaks and Stamina recharge sessions).

Our party was a lancer (TERA tank class, run by Scott of Pumping Irony), priest (run by Oakstout), a sorceror (DPS, run by Scopique of Levelcapped), a warrior (DPS, he was a PUG guy) and my Slayer (DPS). Our levels ranged, iirc, from 21-23.

It was a successful run with Scott doing a great job of tanking and Oakstout being a first rate healer. We had 1 death all night, the PUG dude, who (as PUG dudes are apt to do) kind of kept running off to do his own thing. He was gracious about it, though, acknowledging that the death was his own fault.

I had a lot of fun doing the instance though it was more “spectacle” fun than “thoughtful gaming” fun, if you know what I mean. There’s not a lot of nuance playing DPS in a group, or if there is I haven’t gotten good enough to grasp it yet. Basically I was waiting for the tank to get aggro, then unloading with everything I had until I got the little “You’re about to get aggro” icon and backing off. Though that didn’t happen very often since my skill cool downs were enough to moderate damage I guess.

The only “downside” (and that feels like too strong a word) about the massive unleashing of damage on these innocent dungeon denizens is that it can be really hard to see where you’re facing in all the effect-spam. Since TERA has no enemy lock-on system you have to aim at the baddies and more than once I unleashed my best attack into empty space by accident. At least at the start.

A bit farther along I got into the habit of rushing in, hitting hard, then rolling out of the fray, lining up, and rushing in again. And I think this is how a Slayer is intended to be played. As a leather-wearing melee class I can’t stand there and take the hits. When playing solo I watch the mob and dodge away when it’s about to attack but in the flying furball battles of the Bastion of Lok I’d often miss the tells and get walloped. By rolling out of the battle I get out of the line of fire, give my skills a few seconds to cooldown, and I’d sometimes pop a potion to take some of the strain off our healer.

It’s the first time in an MMO where I felt like getting out of the battle and taking a few seconds breather was OK and not indicative of being a slacker (I always feel a lot of anxiety about people thinking I’m not pulling my weight in a group), though I dunno how other members of the party felt about it.

At the end of the dungeon I got a blue (rare) piece of Lancer armor, and Scott got a blue Slayer sword. So that was weird but we traded and everyone (well, at least the two of us) left happy, but I guess that loot drops are random and not tied to character class (unless this stuff dropped and someone was picking it up and it was just going into normal rotation. From where I stood it seemed like it just popped into my inventory).

The only bad news is that my Slayer went from level 23 to just under level 25 from quest and kill experience in one run-through. I kind of would’ve liked to do BoL another time or two without being over-level for it. But I guess I’ll just have to look forward to the next dungeon!

Gravitaz needs you!

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is gonna be quick since I’m at work, but time is of the essence!

Gravitaz only has about 24 hours to go in their Kickstarter campaign and they’re short of their goal. They need a push from fans of futuristic combat racing!

Here’s a press release they sent out today:

GRAVITAZ Recognized By The International Game Developers Association
GRAVITAZ Kickstarter featured alongside the likes of Banner Saga, Wasteland 2, FTL

DENVER, CO (May 9, 2012) — The GRAVITAZ team was honored today by the International Game Developers Association. The GRAVITAZ Kickstarter, set to raise funds for the high-speed combat hover-racing game, is now in the International Game Developer Association’s recommended projects list. GRAVITAZ can be found alongside such previous Kickstarter successes as The Banner Saga, Wasteland 2, FTL, and Auditorium Duet. (www.kickstarter.com/pages/igda)

“The Kickstarter is going to come down to the wire, but there’s still a shot,” says Megan Fox, one of the programmers behind GRAVITAZ. “If even just 2,000 discover the game and plunk down $10 for a copy, we’re there, that’s funded. The Internet is a mighty big place – surely we can find 2,000 more fans of high-speed combat racing.”

Learn more about how to bring futuristic racing into the present at www.GravitazGame.com.

Emphasis is from me.

If you’ve any interest in this style of game, the now’s the time to come forward and pledge!!

The negative influence of community

Posted on by Nimgimli

Chris over at Levelcapped has started a series called The Theory of Geekdom where he’s exploring “…why geeks are the way they are, what it means for them, and what it means in their relationship with the non-geek mainstream.” All he’s got so far is an introduction, but knowing Chris it’s going to be an interesting series. No pressure, buddy!

As grist for his mill, I wanted to share one micro-experience I just had, as relates to gamers and community and how negative we can be, and how that negativity influences (some) people around you.

I got into the Firefall beta yesterday morning. While I was at work I had the client download, so as soon as I got home I jumped in and played a few missions and really enjoyed myself. But I only got 10-15 minutes before the dog needed walking, dinner needed eating and so on. During this downtime I was pondering the game and everything I didn’t know about it, so the next time I had a moment I jumped on the forums to learn what I could.

Sadly they were typical game forums. Some people trying to give honest feedback and other people shouting them down, calling them inferior gamers, telling them to learn to play and so on. And that was in one thread (the guy had voiced his opinion that the first missions are a bit too hard since he’d died several times).

I quit my browser and got ready for a scheduled Guild Wars gaming session. That session got cut short after about an hour so I fired Firefall back up.

And I didn’t really like it. I played for all of 5 minutes and then quit to play TERA.

So, I play the game and enjoy it. 5 hours later I play the game and don’t enjoy it. What changed? The game obviously didn’t change. I did. And what changed in me?

Suddenly I was seeing the people around me as “those assholes from the forums” instead of as other gamers having fun, and now I didn’t want to have anything to do with them, so I was playing the game like a single player game. Instead of banding together with other players and helping them burn down enemies I was avoiding people and looking for empty spaces to play in.

Just to be clear, the Firefall forums aren’t any worse than the forums of any other online game; I’ve yet to find an ‘official forum’ that wasn’t absolutely vile. And also just to be clear, I’m not a fan of trolls. I do, however, know a troll. There’s a kid I work with who finds trolling endlessly amusing. He legitimately enjoys getting people aggravated and upset and sees absolutely nothing wrong with it, and in fact finds it hilarious. He can’t understand why I don’t also find it hilarious.

In all other aspects, this kid (who is also a gamer) is a really nice guy. In spite of being a troll, he’s always willing to lend a helping hand and get things done. He’s the kind of guy who always lets everyone know when he’s running out to get lunch or whatever, and asks if we want him to pick up anything while he’s out. He’s generally well-liked in the office. I even like him…when he’s not trolling.

But I digress. The point is, if you’re a troll you probably think it’s really stupid that I let what goes on in a forum influence the way I play the game associated with that forum. And I even know, intellectually, that it’s stupid, but this is an emotional thing. I try to deny it but the fact is, I now think all Firefall players are asshats and I’m going to treat them accordingly. Which of course is just going to detract from the in-game community in some small way.

The worst part about gaming forums is that 80% of the population can be friendly and helpful, but the 20% who are trolls are going to make the entire place feel like a cesspit. When you ask “What key do I use to take a screenshot?” you won’t remember the person that simply replies “Print Screen” but you will remember the person who replies:

“First, search the forums before you ask your dumbass question. There are a 100 threads asking how to take screenshots. Second, how the hell did you get into this beta if you’ve never played an online game before? You must not have ever played a game if you don’t know how to take a screenshot because every game uses the same damn key. Maybe do a little research before you open your mouth and prove to the world what a dumbass you are. I swear I miss alpha when these forums weren’t filled with stupid noobs filling up the place with stupid threads like this one.”

So how do we fix this? I don’t think we can. I think this is a symptom of a greater disease. Until we culturally start thinking more about the impact we have on people around us, any anonymous gathering of gamers is going to be vile because there’s always going to be a few trolls who are determined to make it vile.

The only hope I have for the future of Gamers is PAX. When all these people gather in person, the 80% tend to overwhelm the 20% and the overall vibe is really positive. Why? Well first, some percentage of trolls moderate their behavior when they’re in danger of getting a fist in the face. But aside from that, how is it that the gamer bullies are overwhelmed by the friendly gamers dressed like Pikachu? I think it’s because everyone is 100% devoted to being there at PAX. I think on forums, a lot of us are there to get info and get out, while the trolls are just hanging out in there all day trying to piss people off for laughs. Because of this, although they may be 20% of the population they’re generating 60% of the posts. [making numbers up here]

Aside from better moderation (which is a minefield for the moderators) I’m not sure what the answers are. I just think it’s a shame that so many communities are undermined by people like my troll co-worker (scariest part? he’s a psychology major. Or maybe psychiatry… I forget which) who take delight in making others miserable.

A final word: This post focused on the negative side of community but of course there are many positive sides as well. I’m not denying that. Though I’d argue that most positive communities are smaller and somewhat exclusive.

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 5/04/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

Another short update this week. I guess that’s good news. It means I’m focusing on fewer games and not spending as much money on games that I don’t make full use of. 🙂

Purchases This Week

Much to my amazement, I pre-ordered Diablo III this week. I hadn’t really intended to play it, but peer pressure definitely got to me. All my friends are going to be playing and hopefully looking for extra party members and I didn’t want to be left out!

On the other hand, I canceled my Dragon’s Dogma pre-order. Just no time to play it with all these other games, and as it’s a single player game it’ll ‘keep’ until I have time (and it enjoys a price cut).

And not a purchase, but I did get into the Firefall beta as of this morning.

Played This Week
Over the weekend I, like seemingly everyone else, played the Guild Wars 2 beta.

Once that shut down it was back to TERA, but Raptr confirms that it wasn’t a great gaming week. I managed to squeeze in just 5 hours of playing.

Plans for the Week to Come
Tonight I’m joining Dusty Monk and friends in an assault on Guild Wars: Eye of the North. The plan is to make this a weekly outing until we get through all the EOTN content.

Then I’m going to check out Firefall of course, but my major focus for the next week will continue to be TERA. I’m still baffled and bemused by how much fun I’m having in TERA and I suppose a lot of that has to do with how modest my expectations were going in.

Of course, having a bunch of friends playing helps, too!

Elder Scrolls MMO is official. Internet rejoices. I sob.

Posted on by Nimgimli

[Update #2: OK, I’ve found a second source (the infamous un-named source… a source CLOSE TO THE MATTER!) that confirms a totally separate team — separate studio in fact — is still working on the kinds of rich single player RPG we’ve come to love from Bethesda. So I’m placated at this point. Whew! Almost blew a gasket for a minute there.]

[Update: According to a comment from someone who I suspect is someone I trust, 🙂 there’s a totally separate team for the MMO and we’ll still see more single player Elder Scrolls games. Which I’ll take as very good news indeed.]

So Game Informer broke the news that it’s cover game for next month is The Elder Scrolls Online.

Yup, it’s official.

G+ is full of people claiming that spontaneous sexual reactions are happening to them in response to this news.

I, of course, am odd man out. Now I don’t really KNOW anything about The Elder Scrolls Online, but this is the Internet, where Knowing is Irrelevant to the Battle.

Remember how great Knights of the Old Republic was? Remember how OK that 3 weeks you spent playing Star Wars: The Old Republic were? And SW:TOR had the benefit of at least rendering the ancient Star Wars universe using modern-day graphics that put KOTOR to shame.

The Elder Scrolls Online is to Skyrim as SW:TOR is to KOTOR, except The Elder Scrolls Online will probably look slightly worse than Skyrim, given that it’s an MMO.

Now all those dragons you kill will respawn 30 seconds later. All those thieve’s hideouts will be ignored until you get a quest to kill 10 bandits, since clearing them out will be meaningless in a game where everything resets every 45 seconds.

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE MMOs. But I hate that we’ve come to a place where everything HAS to become an online multiplayer game to stay relevant. I was looking forward to the next Elder Scrolls game that would let me be THE HERO instead of just another dweeb grinding for loot and screaming into the LFG channel for someone to help him kill an epic rat.

TERA: Buff-up via gathering

Posted on by Nimgimli

There’s never anything new under the sun, but one of TERA’s (why is it in all caps!!?) systems that is new to me at least is this idea that gathering materials for crafting gets you buffs. I haven’t made a scientific study of this so I don’t know all the details. I assume getting a buff is a random crafting event, but they happen pretty often. And I don’t know if they scale.

To be honest I’d seen the buffs pop up from early on but just assumed they were buffs to help with gathering/crafting, but I finally looked at what they did and turns out they’re buffs that will help in combat. Here’s a few…this might be all of them or just the ones I happened to have at the time I was taking screenshots. Like I said, not a scientific investigation.





These may not seem like much, but gradual magic and healing regeneration helps a lot in keeping you in the battle. (Of course that’s balanced by the time you spend gathering.) And of course the materials you gather can be used in crafting or, if you don’t craft, sold to another player (NPC vendors don’t offer much for crafting materials).

New Gravitaz update

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I’ve mentioned Kickstarter project Gravitaz a few times now and I’ve formed kind of an emotional bond with the team. That’s one of the awesome aspects of Kickstarter, I think. You get (ideally) frequent updates from the developers and you’re along for the ride, cheering them on when things go well and wondering what went wrong when they don’t.

We’ve got another update this week, though it’s mostly for fun. The team went out to a go-kart track for research:

The sad truth is that I don’t think Gravitaz is going to make its funding level unless we can find a new audience of fans who’re excited about the game. With 8 days to go they’re around $18,000 short.

But the take-away from this video is that even if the Kickstarter campaign doesn’t make it, Gravitaz will live on; it’ll just take longer to make. You can’t help but admire the determination that so many Indie game developers have. I was glad to hear this news because Gravitaz is a game I want to play:

In GRAVITAZ, players fly jet-propelled hover vehicles for fame and glory on the rough-and-tumble courses of the world’s first antigravity racing league. Players compete with computer and ghost opponents against time on delicate tracks scaffolded over the faces of skyscrapers and down through city streets with a diverse pool of vehicles, from scratch-built garage projects to high-end sponsored racers. It’s like nothing else on earth – neither go-karts nor Formula 1 can prepare the racers for what they’ll meet on the track.

But it isn’t over until it’s over, and if you’re a fan of combat racing and want to play Gravitaz sooner rather than later, it’s time to step up and pledge. Then tell your friends about the project. Let’s get this thing funded, people!!