The end of the MMO road?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m not the first blogger to write a post like this recently and I wonder why it’s happening all of a sudden.

Nickle tour of my MMO gaming life: I’ve been playing them pretty much since they’ve been making them. I played MMOs before they were called MMOs and you had to pay $6/hour to play on GEnie. Or even more on Compuserve. All the big early players, I played at least for a while. And I might be done.

I came to this realization when thinking about this weekend’s SW:TOR beta. I wasn’t excited to partake in it. I have the client, have the account set up. In theory once it opens all I have to do is log in, and I probably will, just to gawk a bit. But really play? No, I don’t think so.

I was thinking that it just wouldn’t be worth the effort, given that our progress gets wiped on Monday.

And that’s when it hit me. I play MMOs for progress and really only for progress. I don’t play them because the minute-to-minute experience of playing them is fun for me. It used to be; I remember a time where every battle, or at least many battles, felt exciting and interesting. These days it feels more like an exercise in mundane repetition.

Just to be absolutely clear, this isn’t a slam on SW:TOR; the game systems of pretty much all MMOs are the same way. I’m just using SW:TOR as an example, and anyway this is about me and my personal preferences, not about the games, which continue to be wildly popular. Also consider I solo much of the time; battles of course get more interesting as you add more people to them (and therefore more variability). That’s why I liked Rift so much in the early days when people fought the titular rifts.

Anyway I’ll wait for SW:TOR to launch and play it then when my progress will be saved. I’m still interested by all the people talking about how compelling the stories are. In my first beta weekend I only got to level 7 so really didn’t get engaged in any stories that time out. If the stories are really that interesting I’ll stick around, otherwise I’ll just play my 30 days and move on.

I might need to give DC Universe Online another look; as I recall that had combat that was a bit more fun. But why can’t MMOs have combat (and other) systems as rich and interesting and compelling as non-MMOs? How about throwing in the odd puzzle, or climbing section, or something to mix things up? Why do I have to turn to Uncharted or Skyrim to have a good story and fun combat and a rich mix of things to do? Shouldn’t we be getting more from a $15/month game than we do from a 1-shot $60 game?

Fellow gamers: We have free will!

Posted on by Nimgimli

So you may have heard, Skyrim launched. I’ve been playing every spare minute this weekend and so far, it’s quite fun, but like any other open world game there’s gonna be some quirks.

This one was making the rounds even before the game launched:

Silly, huh? I kind of love it when people weird stuff like this.

Not everyone finds it amusing though. I’ve encountered at least one person, a game designer at a major developer, who is calling on Bethesda to “for the love of god” fix the issue. When someone else asked him why, he said that it breaks the illusion that it is a functioning world and turns the game into a farce.

(I’m not mentioned names or linking to the discussion because that last time I did that the person who I linked to got very upset and has since stopped interacting with me, and anyway I’m just using this one incident as an example.)

I thought this outlook was a little bit extreme, given that the issue is easily avoided and in fact if this video hadn’t been making the rounds very few people would have ever considered putting a bucket on the head of an NPC. Full disclosure: I’ve been playing since Friday and I’m not sure how the person you made this video picked up the item to move it like that. My interaction with things has been limited to ‘click to put it in inventory’ or ‘click to drop it from inventory.’ [According to the YouTube comments shudder you hold down the ‘pick up’ button…haven’t tested it yet.]

If Skyrim was a multiplayer game I’d be more sympathetic to the idea that this is something Bethesda has to fix ASAP, but it isn’t. It’s a completely single player game with not even so much as a leaderboard to compare your progress to that of friends. You should play it the way that you enjoy, and if using the old ‘bucket over the head’ trick breaks the game for you: just don’t do it!

This isn’t the first or the last time that this kind of an issue comes up, and the person I’m referring to isn’t alone. It seems to be a compulsion among video gamers that every corner that can be cut must be cut, and every exploit uncovered must be used. Why is that?

When did we lose the ability to create our own rules and follow them? Who didn’t have ‘house rules’ for Monopoly back in the day? Pen & Paper RPGers make up complete rulesets for themselves. Boardgamers do the same thing. If something about a game bothers them, they come up with a house rule to make it more to their liking.

But as soon as a game turns electronic and starts enforcing the rules for us, we seem to forget we have free will and can layer our own ‘house rules’ over the rules the machine enforces. So make a ‘house rule’ that says “No buckets on the heads of NPCs” and enjoy the damned game!

Habitual gaming and the psychology of disruption

Posted on by Nimgimli

Fancy title huh? I used a thesaurus.

I spent most of October playing Glitch like a fiend. I logged in before work and during lunch (the beauty of browser-based gaming) and I’d spend altogether too much time in the evenings exploring and enjoying that weird, wacky world. I never wrote about Glitch because I was spending every free minute playing.

Then a freak snowstorm hit the Northeast and we lost power for about 40 hours. I’ve hardly played Glitch since.

Why? I’m writing this post to try to figure this out.

First of all, this isn’t a post about Glitch; Glitch is just the latest victim of game interruption syndrome. If you look at my long history of MMOs and even some single player games, I’ve stopped playing virtually every one (every one that was decent anyway) when something happened to interrupt my habit of play.

This time it was the power going out. Another time it could be a weekend of travel. It could be crunch time at work that doesn’t allow time for gaming, or a bad illness that keeps me bedridden for a few days. It could even be another game.

But my pattern is this:

I get a new game and get immersed in it. It becomes an Important Activity to me. I imagine what I’ll be doing in that game in 6 months. What life will be like at cap. This is My Game now! So happy!

Then I can’t play for a few days. Other things demand my attention and the game kind of recedes into the back of my mind. When I finally can play again, it no longer seems all that important to do so. It isn’t that I hate the game all of a sudden. Quite the contrary. I’ll have every intention of playing every night, but somehow never get around to actually logging in.

Why? I still don’t know. Is this just my ADD firing off? Or are games somehow a little like a drug I get addicted to, and after a few days of ‘withdrawal’ from not playing, I lose the craving?

I’m not talking about interruptions so long I forget how to play, or anything like that. I don’t think it is game mechanic related, or having to do with forgetting what I was working on. These interruptions are much briefer than that.

I don’t feel totally crazy because Chris from LevelCapped was without power for a lot longer than I was and I remember him saying (on Google+, presumably from his office where they had power!) that he didn’t really miss playing. That sounded similar, at least, to what goes on with me.

Or maybe I’m wrong and I really am totally crazy. 🙂

Uncharted 3 – finished

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m feeling a bit melancholy today. You see, last night I finished Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. That means I’ve got two years to wait for Uncharted 4 (assuming such a title exists, or will exist). UC3 will probably wind up being my personal “Game of the Year,” unless Skyrim *really* surprises me.

So, some final thoughts.

Without booting up Uncharted 2 for comparison, I actually feel like UC3’s gameplay mechanics were actually a bit jankier this time out. Part of that comes from the richness of the animation; it can make small movements more challenging than they should be. You know the drill: you have to climb a ladder but every time you move the analog stick you walk past it since the smallest step Drake will take is a bit too far.

This was’t as big a deal as it might have been for a few reasons. First is that Drake generally saves himself. If you nudge the controller and walk off a ledge, he’ll grab on. You have to actually jump off a ledge to fall. And even if you do that, UC3 is filled with invisible checkpoints and respawns are super fast so you can just try again.

Also, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for me. I love how cool Drake looks when he’s running through narrow passageways, bouncing off walls and stuff.

Honestly I play Uncharted for the narrative and the spectacle, not for precise controls or state-of-the-art shooter technology. Enemies are still bullet sponges (unless you go for the head shots) but ammo is plentiful. Some of the fancy stuff (eg grabbing a live grenade and throwing it back at the enemies) doesn’t always work that well. Drake was constantly hitting a wall with those live grenades and blowing himself up. I quickly learned that it was better just to dive for cover.

I really wish I’d never watched any of the preview coverage of the game, since a few of the best ‘set piece’ moments were totally spoiled by those. [SPOILER already spoiled by preview trailers] As soon as I got on to that big cruise ship I knew I was going to end up in the hold with the ship sinking, for instance.[/SPOILER]

That said, the sense of chaos and bat-shit craziness is amazing. Naughty Dog loves putting you on moving terrain. That’s all I’ll say about that. My jaw was hanging open an awful lot.

I generally play games on Easy these days, but I played Uncharted 3 on Normal and it was still really easy. That’s not a complaint, just an observation. I was glad I didn’t get too hung up since, again, I was playing for the narrative and wanted to keep things moving along. Frustration, for me, can ruin the pacing so easily.

I love these characters and I find that to be a particularly rare feeling in games. I know a lot of folks who love the characters in Mass Effect and Dragon Age but none of those ever resonated with me like Drake, Sully and Elena do. They’re like family! Chloe is back too, and she’s brought a friend.

One really curious choice is that Naughty Dog jumped ahead a few years (at least) between UC2 and UC3 and, well, stuff happened. Stuff that is referred to somewhat obliquely and never expanded upon. I want to know more! In a perfect world we’d get some awesome single player DLC mini-episodes that bridge the gap between UC2 and UC3.

I just adore this series. If I hadn’t already pre-ordered a Playstation Vita, I’d be pre-ordering one today just so I could play the Uncharted game it’s getting. When I finished my first play-through of UC3 last night, I sat through all the credits and then jumped into watching the featurettes included on the disk. Then my cursor hovered over the “Another round” campaign option.

But no, I need to clear my plate for Skyrim this Friday.

Please Naughty Dog: Put my fears to rest and announced Uncharted 4 already. I’ll carve out time in my 2013 fall schedule for you!

Lovin’ on games

Posted on by Nimgimli

Been a while, eh? I have to admit that Google+ has been my ‘blogging’ platform lately, but I had a hankering to get back to something a bit more structured. We’ll see how long that lasts. Anyway, here goes…

I’ve been playing electronic games since there’ve been electronic games to play, pretty much. OK I wasn’t in the MIT lab playing Space War! on a PDP-1 when it was invented, but I lived through the transition from mechanical pinball tables to Pong and from there on out, I was a “Gamer.”

We gamers can be a snarky bunch, and we love to argue and debate and proselytize almost as much as we like to play. In fact sometimes I start to get the feeling that actually playing the games comes second to talking about them.

Then every so often the stars align and I’m 12 years old again and staring at a TV screen that is somehow also a game, and a feeling of joy suffuses my spirit.

I’d lost track of the release date of Uncharted 3 so I was a little surprised when the UPS dude dropped it off (along with a cookie for Lola) yesterday. I wasn’t even that excited when I slid the disk into the PS3 later that night. Even though I’d really enjoyed (and finished — a rare event for me) the first two games, somehow the hype for #3 hadn’t really touched me.

And then I launched the game, and the Uncharted theme started to play and a few seconds later Drake and Sully were walking down a London Street, dressed to the nines, and I was hooked.

This blog post isn’t a review and I’m not trying to convince you that you should play Uncharted 3. There are plenty of reviews out there that you can read and decide for yourself. I’m just trying to remind you of what it’s like to truly love a game, warts and all. When’s the last time you felt that way? For me it’d been a little while. Maybe since Red Dead Redemption.

Uncharted, for me, is about story and chemistry. The actual gameplay isn’t all that special and in parts can actually be kind of clunky. But I am genuinely fond of the characters and I love how much work Naughty Dog puts into ‘throwaway’ actions in cut scenes. A tiny example… as the crew sits around a table trying to unravel a puzzle, Chloe (voiced by Claudia Black) throws out a possible answer. Drake (Nolan North) seizes on it as a good lead and the focus of the scene moves to him. But in the background we see Chloe fist-bumping with Charlie Cutter (Graham McTavish), her new beau and a new member of the team. A trivial action? Absolutely, but that’s kind of the point. It’s tiny details like this that make the experience transcend “video game cut scene” and become “interactive movie.”

If you hate interactive movies, that’s OK. There’re lots of games to play besides Uncharted 3.

In a way, I think the Uncharted series is the West’s answer to Final Fantasy. I play both series to get to the next chunk of story, and the stories in Uncharted are good enough to pull me through to the end of the game. That isn’t always true with Final Fantasy: as a Western series, Uncharted’s stories are much less obtuse than they are in a typical iteration of Final Fantasy, too. That helps keep me involved.

Before yesterday I’d been sitting on my hands, squirming in anticipation for Skyrim to release, but now I can’t wait for the work day to end so I can jump back into Uncharted 3. I can’t wait to see what happens next, and I can’t wait to see how Elena (Emily Rose) is going to factor into this episode’s adventure. I love these characters the same way I love Gandalf or Malcolm Reynolds. The fact that they appear in a video game is almost beside the point. Journeying through their adventures with them makes me happy. And making me happy is what games are (generally) supposed to do. [Qualifier to allow for the few ‘message’ games that are out there.]

Microsoft Wireless Speed Wheel

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last week on the day Forza 4 came out, I was poking around in Best Buy (a favorite way to kill time on my lunch hour) and I saw this weird U-shaped contraption in the same ‘end cap’ display case as Forza: The Microsoft Wireless Speed Wheel [MWSW]. My first thought was that it was just a prop for Kinect, like the plastic Wii steering wheel that you snap the Wii Remote into. Then I saw it was $60 and figured it had to be more. I was vaguely intrigued and more so when Scott from Pumping Irony mentioned he had one pre-ordered.

This week I was back in Best Buy and now they had an Xbox station set up running the Forza 4 demo with the MWSW. I gave it a whirl and it actually felt pretty good. Much better than I thought it would. I was in need of a bit of retail therapy anyway, and the next thing you know (OK truth? I had to go to 3 stores to find it in stock. Target had it) I’m the owner of a copy of Forza 4 and the wheel.

Last night I spent a few hours driving with it, and I continue to be impressed, but let’s get the bad news out of the way first. There’re no bumper buttons and no jack for a headset. I don’t care about the latter but it was enough to cause Scott to cancel his pre-order. I do miss the buttons; they aren’t used while driving in Forza but they are used while navigating the interface. Also in other parts of the game where you’d use the right analog stick to move the camera around…you’re out of luck. The Wheel has no analog sticks.

This wouldn’t be a huge issue except that (unless I’m missing something) the Xbox 360 is stupid about having two controllers connected at the same time, without two Xbox Live accounts to go with them. Switching between Wheel and standard controller was a hassle, forcing me to constantly log in to my Xbox Live account each time I picked up the other controller. Eventually the system got so confused that the main display thought I was logged in but the pop-up ‘blade’ display [what do you call that?] thought I wasn’t.

I’m no Xbox 360 guru so if there’s a better way of handling this I’d love to hear it. I don’t mind setting down one controller and grabbing another between races if I don’t have to do all this logging in and out.

So that’s the bad stuff. The good? The wheel works really well when actually racing in Forza 4. I could hold a line nicely and my lane transitions were very smooth. At the end of each arm of the U, underneath, is a trigger. The right is for gas, the left is for brakes. There’s a D-pad on the tip of the left arm, used for shifting, and the face buttons are on the tip of the right, used for handbrake, clutch, look back and rewind. The game defaulted to a manual transition and I decided, for once, to stick with it. Shifting quickly came to feel natural; as you hold the Wheel your thumb rests easily on that D-pad.

How you hold the wheel doesn’t matter (in Forza at least). You can hold it up vertically or almost rest it horizontally in your lap. I thought my arms would get tired after a while but that wasn’t really a problem. Sometimes I’d rest the base of it on my lap while driving. You can also easily scratch your nose in the middle of a race…steering one-handed for a few seconds isn’t a problem using the wheel.

The wheel is heavier than you might expect it to be but that gives it some…inertia maybe? I think if it was any lighter you’d lose some stability. Eventually one hand started to cramp a little bit but I think that was due to my deathgrip on the thing during tense racing action. 🙂

According to the docs, the wheel can read pitch and yaw in games that require it to, so presumably it’d be a good controller in flight or space games too.

I do think Forza 4, or other games that have a simulation feel, would be a better fit than an arcade racer where you’re throwing your car violently into turns or ramming other cars off the road. The wheel feels like it’s better for finesse than for radical movements, and Forza 4 is a game of finesse. You rarely have to turn more than (total guesstimate) 20 degrees. Turning the wheel more than 90 degrees would feel really awkward.

As a test, at the end of the night I put down the wheel and picked up the controller and went back to Forza 4. Sure enough, my driving suffered. Maybe you’re better than I am, but I find in driving games my car tends to wobble a bit as I push the analog stick through the dead zone and then over-steer slightly as I leave the dead zone. I can correct of course but it doesn’t feel or look like real driving. With the wheel my replays look like there’s a person actually driving the car.

If you have a force-feedback steering wheel, I’m sure that’s going to be better than the MWSW. But for those of us without the room for a proper wheel and pedal setup, in my opinion the Microsoft Wireless Speed Wheel is a better alternative to driving with a standard controller.

D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter

Posted on by Nimgimli

A few weeks back I got into the beta of a new Facebook game, D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter. Since then I’ve been playing it off and on and I have to tell you, I’m feeling very conflicted about it. See the thing is, I dislike Facebook quite a bit, and even more so after the events of the last week or two. But I’m finding D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter to be a decent turn-based strategy game. Please Atari, make an iPad version, or a Google+ version, or a Kongregate version…let me play it somewhere other than Facebook!

Anyway, D&D:HON has you recruiting a party of 4 adventurers, including yourself of course, and heading off on grid-based, turn-based adventures. If your friends are playing, you can recruit their characters into your party for free; otherwise you can hire the heroes of strangers for increasing amounts of gold as you need higher and higher level characters. Going on an adventure costs you Energy, which replenishes over time. This is the $$ hook; you can pay to have your energy replenished if you’re having a grand old time playing. (You purchase Astral Diamonds which can then be used to do things besides replenishing energy. Stuff like resurrecting yourself…oh so very tempting when you die near the end of an adventure.)

The adventures themselves take place in a series of rooms and generally you have to kill the bad guys in the room to advance. Something there’ll be traps (bring a rogue to disarm) and sometimes there’ll be treasure chests. As you grow your character they learn various skills, and most of these skills can be used once per room (though a few can only be used once per adventure). Each turn a character can move, attack/use a skill, and use items. Some skills are also ‘free’ and can be used in addition to an attack. The basic gameplay is fun and hampered only by the fact that the game is built in Flash, meaning the interface is a bit cumbersome. I sure wish Flash would support right mouse buttons.

Between adventures you can wander around town by clicking from building to building. There are shops, a recruitment hall, and your own house where you can see your achievements and get a free daily gift. You also get a handful of gold every day just for logging in…more each day up to 5 consecutive days, then it rolls over back to 5 gold for day 1.

You can have multiple characters and each one has his or her own energy pool, which is a nice touch. There’s no way to trade items between characters (or with other players). You can, of course, gift your friends with stuff in typical Facebook fashion.

At level 10 you’re able to create your own adventures and share them with other players. If you want to level quickly there are plenty of adventures designed by other players to give you an “I WIN” button and help you advance. Using just the game-supplied adventures will keep your leveling speed pretty low, as fits the whole D&D license (IMO at least). In fact it can be a challenge to keep a positive cash flow if you’re hiring adventures to head out with you.

Anyway, it’s a Facebook game, but that means it’s free to try. I don’t really play Facebook games these days, but I’ve been making an exception for Heroes of Neverwinter; that must say something about the title. It’s probably an easier game if you have lots of friends playing, but playing ‘solo’ is definitely viable, at least for as far as I’ve gotten. Check it out!

DC has a new home

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hey folks,

I moved this blog to a new ISP today. If you’re seeing this post, you’re seeing the site at its new home.

I’m sure -something- got broken, so if you notice any bugs, I’d appreciate it if you left a comment.

Game endings: is it me or do they suck?

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I finally finished Resistance 2 this weekend. It was a really fun ride right up until the end. The end, I felt, was annoying as hell and I couldn’t wait to get through it.

Which felt really familiar to me. And thinking back, it seems that with any kind of action-based game (FPS or 3rd person action-adventure stuff) I always get annoyed at the end. (And keep in mind I don’t finish many games so maybe I’m just finishing the wrong ones.)

I can’t decide if my problem is due to me, or due to game designers. It might just be that once I “feel” the end is near I start thinking about the next game I’m going to play, so I get in a hurry to finish the one I’m currently playing and so anything that trips me up starts feeling like an annoyance rather than a challenge. I also always get into the “I just want to finish this before going to bed” trap and suddenly it’s 2 am, I’m dead tired and cranky and making stupid mistakes.

Or it might be the designers always feel like they have to add 1) a big “surprise” twist at the end of the game, which is so expected now that it isn’t the least bit of a surprise and 2) one big hoopla fight designed to challenge the players one last time.

I hate the twist…it’s become such a trope. Y’know, the whole game you’re fighting to get into the castle tower and you finally get there and “Oh no, the evil wizard left his minion behind and now he’s in the castle dungeon. Retrace your steps!” Or a favorite alternative is “Yay I killed the ultimate bad guy…game over? NO! He’s reborn in a more powerful form! Fight him again!”

And the hoopla… the reborn boss can kill that bird with the same stone. Other hooplas are a sudden absence of checkpoints or a new twist to the gameplay that changes everything around. For instance the end of Halo when it turns from a shooter into a driving game. In the case of Resistance 2 it was a series of 3 domes you had to travel through. As you entered each one you got locked inside and had to wait for the big bad to tear it apart to get at you. Said big bad is impervious to your weapons and easy to avoid (stand in the center of the dome) and he takes a LONG time to destroy the domes. I spent that time petting the dog since the game literally didn’t require my attention at all. Between the domes you have to fight and dodge insta-kill hurled debris, and if you die, you have to start before the first dome – no checkpoints. Then the very very end is Halo-like… traverse a crumbling installation before the timer counts down and blows everything up.

I don’t really play games for the challenge, which probably is why the endings are so annoying when that spike in challenge is probably appreciated by many players. Plus I always have more games that I want to play than available time to play them, so I like my games shorts and intense, so drawn out endings always dilute the experience for me.

Anyway, not really singling out Resistance 2 on this…it was a pretty good game overall, and it’s no worse in this ending respect than many other games I’ve played. And now I can play Resistance 3!

Gaming console, motion controlled mis-adventures

Posted on by Nimgimli

So here’s my cluster-f**k story of getting Kinect to work in our living room.

Over the past few weeks I’ve finally accumulated a Tri-Mount ($30) and a Nyko Zoom ($30). I became aware of both of these gadgets back during E3 but now they’re finally on the market. So today I was ready to set everything up when Angela made sad eyes at me because I was going to take away “her” Kinect (set up in the office on my old launch 360). So it was off to Best Buy to purchase another Kinect sensor.

Good news? $25 gift card if you buy a Kinect this weekend, and they now come with a code for the full version of Child of Eden. Bad news? Another $150.

Screw-up #1 is that my TV is too fat for the Tri-Mount to fit on. But just very slightly too fat. The Tri-Mount has a long screw fixture that you use to adjust the thing. We disassembled it and pulled the ‘tongue’ out just a tad farther and hot-glued it there and it now fits on the TV. Hopefully it’ll hold because it’s just a friction fit. When set up right you can tighten up the screw assembly to ensure a tight, secure grips.

So I set everything up, including attaching the Zoom, moved the coffee table and fired up the Xbox. Things were going OK until Kinect tried to look down at the floor and reported it couldn’t see it. Huh? I tried again. Same thing. I think that, because the Tri-Mount is so hyper-extended backwards, the Kinect is back so far that, with the Zoom (which is essentially a wide-angle lens, as far as I can tell) attached the top of the TV (and/or the Playstation Eye, which sits in front of and below the Kinect) is blocking the line of site of the Zoom.

Here’s the kick in the teeth part, though. So with nothing left to lose I remove the Zoom and guess what? Since the Kinect is now so far back…there was enough room in the living room for it to calibrate, if I stand right against the couch. /facepalm

So the good news is I have the thing setup. I have no room for leaping about but nor do I have any interest in that. I wanted it for voice commands, mostly, and whatever else they put into ‘core games’ that I can do sitting down. I played 3 rounds of a demo of Fruit Ninja Kinect to re-assure myself that flailing around in front of the TV is still not fun.

The other good news is that I fired up the PS3 and grabbed a Move controller to make sure that was still working. Popped in The Shoot since it was handy. And re-assured myself that the Move is still a blast to mess around with. I have that cheap-o Pistol thing and it turns The Move into a really fun light-gun game. Really fun for a few minutes anyway.

I still think a good old controller is the best way to play video games for anything more than 15 minutes, unless your goal is to get some exercise. But I’ll enjoy talking to the Kinect and will continue to dabble with the Move now and then, so at the end of the day it’s all good.

However, Microsoft really needs to work on making the Kinect small-room friendly. Or just make a voice-only model.