The Field Marshal's Guide to Widescreen

Megan Fox

Revised and newly-illustrated for 2008!

It may be hard to believe, but there are still some idiots out there banging on about Bioshock's implementation of widescreen being "broken". It's an issue I've covered, and a notion I subsequently dismissed, in a previous discussion.

The situation is simple. You are trying to render a view of a 3-dimensional virtual scene onto a 2-dimension window, namely your computer's monitor. The problem is that computer monitors are available in widescreen (WS) and non-widescreen (which I'll call "standard def" or SD) formats.
Given that we don't want to distort the image by squeezing it, there are essentially two options for how the image that's displayed on a WS device will relate to that on an SD screen. You can either keep the horizontal field of view constant and vary the vertical field of view according to the aspect ratio of the screen, or vice versa.
This is where the contention arises. Let's look at how Bioshock approaches the problem, with the aid of some pretty pictures.



In Bioshock, the horizontal field of view is kept constant, and an SD device (green line) displays more of the game world at the top and bottom of the screen than the widescreen display (red line).

Note that this is similar to what happens when you letterbox a widescreen movie on an SD TV, or even a 2.35 format movie on a widescreen TV, which anyone who's interested in preserving the original theatrical format will tell you is preferable to "pan and scan" cropping.

The difference is that while dvds or TV signals are encoded at a fixed resolution, a computer game is essentially resolution-independent (within the computer's performance limitations). So a computer game doesn't need to worry about black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, and can just fill them in with an extended view of the game world. In fact a similar effect occurs with some movies which are produced in a 1.85 format for widescreen TVs, and then cropped to 2.35 for the theatrical release. So you're actually seeing more of the film on the "narrower" display device.

Some people believe this is unacceptable. Some people believe it is wrong. Some people believe that widescreen implies wider field of view. It doesn't.
For completeness here is the alternative method, keeping the vertical field of view constant and displaying more of the game world on the left and right of the screen on a widescreen display.



Personally I consider the horizontal field of view to be the more important axis, but contrary to what some people might claim that does not mean it should be greater on a widescreen display.
My favourite example is to consider the situation where you have a WS and SD monitor with the same physical width. For example a 17" widescreen and a 19" SD. In that case, why should the horizontal field of view be any less on the SD display? The answer is, of course, there's no reason why it should. If the monitors have the same width, the SD screen has the larger area and so in that case it would make sense for it to display more of the game world.



Just as I concluded in my previous discussion on this subject, there really is no right or wrong solution. It's a matter of personal preference. However, it is wrong to claim that Bioshock's implementation is broken. It plainly isn't broken at all. You might be used to a different implementation, and you might have read some hyperbolic, outraged righteous indignation drooled onto web forums by simple-minded widescreen owners who think they're being short-changed by the developers, but the fact is those people are just too stupid or ignorant to understand the issue they're complaining about.

I was particularly gratified when 2K stood their ground and quite rightly denied there was anything wrong with their code. They even confirmed that they do indeed develop on widescreen monitors and so what you're seeing in-game is absolutely what they intended and not some sort of mistake. Although they did add a "Horizontal FOV Lock option" (note "option", not "fix") as a concession to all the bleating, witless morons.

The next time you encounter someone making unfounded claims concerning Bioshock and widescreen camera geometry, feel free to point them in the direction of this article and then proceed to tut, shake your head and mutter "you idiot" at them in a suitably disdainful manner.

On the Subject of TV

Lena Headey

A brief adjournment for the usual game-related proceedings, and a short discussion on the subject of some TV series that I have recently observed.

Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
This could, and probably should have been shit. That it's not is down to just a couple of factors, namely a good (and very hot, especially when she wears her hair up) actress in the Sarah Connor lead role, and an ex-Oz cast member in the supporting cast.
As such it passes my "Oz" test, whereby any series that features ex-Oz cast members raises itself up from the mire of mediocrity to become genuinely good. The more ex-Oz cast, the better the series. See also "Cane" & "Dexter" for other recent examples.
Apart from those two it's not exactly gripping, genius programming, but it's quite watchable. I would have preferred a more statuesque, Jeri Ryan / Natasha Henstridge-style "good" terminator, but of course these sorts of shows have to appeal to the "y00t" demographic, typically by featuring young, vaguely-attractive, interchangeable, anonymous nobodies in as many roles as possible.

Knight Rider
Talking of anonymous nobodies, this recent Knight Rider remake pilot was absolutely packed with them. It also failed the Oz test. And despite trying their hardest to hook the likes of me early on with promises of lesbians and hot three-way sexy action, it still managed to be utter shite. The lesbian is hideous for a start, and the sexy action was all over in the first 5 minutes, leaving another hour-and-a-half of tedious, ill-conceived twattery.
No doubt they were paid obscene wads of cash to use a shitty Mustang as the new kitt, but unfortunately it already looks low-rent and dated before the show's even started. And Val Kilmer's kitt voice is immensely forgettable. I didn't even realise it was him until I looked it up.
I suspect the new Michael could be quite good given better material to work with, but the rest of the cast are unspeakably poor quality. It's sad that the hot technician girl from the original series has been replaced by the token wacky, goofy, hil-ar-ious nerd. The whole show felt massively focus-grouped and formulaic and naturally ended up being bland and soul-less.

Bionic Woman
Even more anonymous nobodies, this time they even scoured the globe for them, and another Oz-test failure. This show had virtually no redeeming qualities. Even the obvious opportunities for hot lesbo catfight action weren't capitalised upon, which is simply criminal. Only the younger sister offered any visual relief, and even she was quite irritating.
Pure shit.

On the Subject of Half-Life

Shay Laren

I've managed to steer clear of annoying fuckwits on game forums for a day or two*, and instead used that time to play Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Being episodic (or, "short") it was over in a single sitting. It was quite good, nothing revolutionary though and really just the same old trivial puzzles and shooting at the same old enemies (with the exception of the token "new enemy"). I was under the impression it was supposed to be the best episode yet, but there was nothing really out of the ordinary.
It was yet another outing for the notoriously mute hero Gordon Freeman, and having just finished The Witcher (and then immediately starting it again) I was reminded just how odd it is to have a character-less character in the lead role. I know it's allegedly intentional, but personally I'm not a fan of that sort of hands-off approach to character design where the player is supposed to fill in the blanks.
The problem is, Gordon Freeman isn't an "everyman" character. The whole point of Half-Life was that he was a physicist, albeit an average one, who took part in an ultimately disastrous experiment and spent the rest of the game escaping from the Black Mesa facility. He's not a trained CIA assassin, or a rock musician, or a sculptor. There's not really much room for interpretation, and to suggest that his anonymity is somehow a clever, post-modern design concept is naive.
Freeman's (lack of) character is not the only aspect of Half-Life which is designed to be willfully minimalist but ultimately ends up falling flat. In Half-Life 2 the back story to the player's current predicament, essentially the story of what has happened since the events of the first game, is left purposely obscure. The idea appears to be that you pick up bits and pieces as you progress through the game. In practice, whether intentionally or as a result of poor design, you end up at the conclusion of the game with barely any more idea what has happened than you had at the start.
Valve's attitude seems to be that this obscuration is entirely intentional and the gaming media seem to have accepted it, treating it like some sort of masterpiece of game design. At a push I can accept that it's intentional, but I disagree that it's successful, or even appropriate to the game.
A similar example of character design which seems to be at odds with the direction of the game is evident in System Shock 2. Despite being an excellent game, I always thought it was odd that the player had three careers to choose from. Odd, because the whole story of the game revolves around you being a "hacker". It's even mentioned in the first line of the opening monologue of the game. I appreciate the desire to allow the player to be able to customise their character, but the career structure ended up feeling awkward in context. On the other hand while SS2 shared HL's mute, generic main character, it worked out better in SS2 since the player rarely encounters any dialogue with other characters. In HL2, and even more so in the subsequent episodes, the likes of Alex and her dad are forever jibber-jabbering at Gordon, while he just stands there like some sort of retard.
I can see what they were trying to do, I just don't think it works very well. There have been some great first-person shooters with strong lead characters (Duke Nukem, Serious Sam) so it's not that FPS's must have an anonymous leads in the style of Quake or Doom.
To me, letting the player do the work of designing the character just seems like a cop-out. It's true that reading a book allows you to imagine the details, and that good horror movies often work best when the scary stuff is mostly left to the imagination. It's also true that there are some instances where it's preferable to allow the player to design their character. For example in MMOs, where thousands, even millions of people are essentially playing the same character in the story so there needs to be some room for differentiation. Especially on old-school "role-play" servers where people rejoice in creating their own personal role within the game world. As soon as you put the player within a well- (or in Half-Life 2's case, not so well-)defined narrative, there's necessarily less room for improvisation without undermining the story you're trying to tell.
And I haven't even touched on the whole subject of the G-Man. Half-Life 2, like those piss-poor Matrix sequels, suffers from the franchise not originally having been designed to have sequels, and from designers who don't seem to be capable of expanding the first game in a compelling way. So instead they barely bother to write any story at all, and then pretend that that's what they intended all along. But that aside, what the fuck is the G-Man about? Don't imagine that "all will become clear" because I guarantee they'll never come up with a satisfying conclusion. Why does this suit, who seems to be capable of manipulating time and space at will, need some guy to go crawling around in air ducts and shoot zombies? Valve seem intent on painting themselves into a corner with this nonsensical bullshit, under the pretense of it being clever and abstract. It's not clever, it's shit.
Still, it was an enjoyable enough episode. It did make me wonder how much longer they'll keep flogging Half-Life 2 before leaving it die with some dignity. Two episodes down and neither have added anything fundamentally new and to be honest it's starting to feel a bit tired. That's actually the downside to episodic content; just when you reach some sort of conclusion within the story along comes another episode and the goal posts are moved just that little bit further. If Valve don't come up with some serious fireworks to wrap up this game (and they won't), it'll be a big disappointment. They will, of course, claim it was intentional.

* Mostly because I have a strict rule that when I'm wound up enough to actually post a reply in a thread, I won't return to it because I really don't care what self-important, ignorant bullshit the dumb fucks have responded with.

On the Subject of Guild Wars

Katie Fey

Will someone please stop me from visiting online game forums? Why do I do it? Today's unfortunately encounter was with a Guild Wars forum. The thread in question concerned the topic of whether the game has become "tediously easy".
Guild Wars is approaching it's third birthday. It was never the most complex of "MMO"s (a title disputed by players of more involved games like EQ) and really the PvE was always treated as an added bonus compared with the core PvP. In fact the PvP game is played in an annual world championship tournament, making GW perhaps the Counter-Strike of MMOs.
But there is a PvE game and the first chapter, retroactively titled Prophecies, still offers a fun gaming experience.
Unless you've been playing for 3 years. I've previously commented (several times) that MMOs, at least when it comes to PvE, are less dependent on genuine skill and more reliant on experience, whether that experience comes about first-hand or is appropriated from a source such as GuildWiki. The fact is, if you've been playing GW for 3 years you're going to have a pretty good idea how to beat any given situation. That's not being "skillful", that's a result of having played more or less every encounter the game has to offer, perhaps several times across multiple professions.
A short while after the release of the third chapter, "Nightfall", A-Net got around to releasing NF's version of an end-game raid dungeon, namely the Domain of Anguish. Oh, the wailing that was heard on forums around the world. OMG it's insanely hard!!! OMG this isn't fun!!! Fast-forward a year, and predictably we now suffer forum threads of people complaining that DoA, along with the rest of the game, is way too easy.
NF even introduced "Hard Mode", where the stats of all the creaures in all the instances are substantially boosted in order to give the self-important hardcore players something to occupy themselves in between wanking over their own greatness.
Artificially cranking up the difficulty of a game is something I touched on when I encountered Crysis. There are obviously a lot of people out there who are desperate to prove some sort of "achievement", even if it's the worthless achievement of having beaten a game at it's maximum difficulty. The problem is, cranking up the difficulty beyond the "natural" challenge level usual creates situations that are frustrating and unbalanced and usually end up getting beaten through the use of exploits rather than any sort of skill.
GW is particularly susceptible to this issue, in a relatively subtle way. The game is generally less level and gear-dependent than many RPGs, but offers a much larger range of available skills across multiple professions, where you can take on an arbitrary "secondary" profession as necessary. Combined with the fact that each additional chapter has introduced new skills, and in some cases professions, and the potential number of combinations of skills at your disposal is in the thousands. I'm sure the precise number has been calculated.
Understandably with so many potential combinations there end up being "trick" builds. Perhaps the most well-known is the "55" Monk farming build, but the end result is that for any given encounter there usually ends up being a "correct" build that you can easily go and look up. Of course hardcore players would never admit to using other people's builds but the fact is there are very few people who have genuinely created new builds, the rest are using variations.
Note there are essentially counters to every possible build when it comes to PvP, but also when you have a properly-managed team, the potential team build combinations is also much larger.
Trick builds that unbalance PvP are notorious for being nerfed by A-Net because they can't afford to compromise the balance of their beloved competitive PvP. On the other hand, PvE-centric builds are rarely touched and can have a long lifespan.
The point is that these trick builds can be considered "exploits" in the sense that they can allow players to beat encounters in ways that weren't intended by the game designers and subsequently make the game easier to beat.
What I don't understand is why people continue to play a game that they consider "tediously easy". It's as if they feel they are owed something for having spent thousands of hours of their lives beating the game. In the case of GW they've already had Hard Mode, and now they've beaten that too. Let's not forget that not only is GW subscription-free, but is also at the end of it's life now that A-Net are preparing GW2. Do they really expect A-Net to rework the entire game just to cater to some twats who feel like they need more of a challenge because too many people have achieved the same level as them and they're having trouble proving how leet they are?
What do you think GW2 will bring? What's really sad is that a large number of GW1 players want GW2 to be little more than a glorified expansion. They even wanted to take their existing characters over but fortunately A-Net crushed that by setting the sequel "hundreds of years" in the future compared with GW1. Those players basically wanted all their "hard work" in GW1 to count towards 2 so that they could get a head start on any noobs that were coming the GW for the first time. I found that attitude sickening and frankly fucking ignorant. If the sequel turns out to be so similar to the original game that is essentially is a glorified sequel, you can bet those same idiots will be the first to complain that it's "easy" and "boring". Imagine letting them bring fully-skilled, full-equipped characters from the first game. What a bunch of fucking morons.
Meanwhile if GW2 is radically different, those players will complain that it's "lost it's feel", while secretly being upset that they have to learn a load of new systems along with everyone else.
I hope GW2 is different to the direction GW1 has taken in the most recent chapters. A-Net, not known for making clever decisions when it comes to the evolution of the game, have gradually introduced more and more grind in an effort to keep long-time players busy. This is in stark contrast to the original chapter of the game which was much more narrative-driven and about adventure and exploration rather than stupid, tiered title-tracks. Sadly I suspect they'll just keep going in that direction and GW2 will be an epic grind-fest that is even harder to distinguish from "grown-up" MMOs.
But at least that'll make the grind-whores happy.

The Field Marshal's Guide to Forum Posting

Jelena Jensen

Some people obviously require some assistance when it comes to the very basics of online conversation. Perhaps they should spend less time fucking about grinding MMOs and, oh I don't know, go to school.
But I'm nothing if not generous, and so to give you a gentle shove in the right direction, and so that I don't have to come back later and kick your illiterate teeth in, here are some very simple guidelines to get you started and hopefully prevent you turning into yet another MMO forum twat.

1. Try READING a post before replying to it. All too often people reply to a title or opening sentence of a post and miss the entire point the original poster was trying to make. Don't respond to what the OP might have meant, but in all likelihood didn't mean. Don't assume you can predict every argument the OP will make just because it's a subject about which you're particularly passionate, or because you've been playing longer than them. Don't argue a point the OP didn't even make, or a point on which you actually agree if only you'd bothered to read their post in the first place.

1a. If you fail point 1 and someone calls you on it, do NOT attempt to justify your original reply by claiming the original poster obviously "meant something different" or that somehow you were actually correct, and begin a tiresome, thread-jacking argument just because you can't cope with being wrong. Shut the FUCK up and move on.

2. Do NOT begin a reply with "Uh,". That's shorthand for "I want to give the impression that I'm at least considering your point of view, but really I'm much more experienced and skilful than you, and I probably didn't even read beyond the first line or title of your post because that's all I need to know and now here comes my ill-conceived and probably entirely inappropriate, contradictory response".

3a. It's "couldn't care less", NOT "could care less". Fucking stop and think about what you're actually typing for one motherfucking second. If you do not care at all about something, you could NOT care less. If you COULD care less, you obviously care about it.
This one is becoming so common that people will even use that in itself as an excuse for using it. As if "could care less" is a sort of clever, louche variation that is doubly ironic. It's not, you're just a fucking idiot.

3b. It's rIdiculous, not rEdiculous, moron.

4. When someone posts a thread complaining about the difficulty of some in-game encounter, do NOT simply reply with some variation of "I did it easily" or "I did it first time". No one gives a shit about how good you are at a game, so stop looking for excuses to boast about it and try actually offering some helpful advice. Assuming you have any, and you probably don't. The fact is, there are some some games which can be beaten easily if you happen to get lucky, but can also be nigh-on impossible if luck is against you. Simply claiming "it's easy" is fucking ignorant.

5. If you've got nothing useful to add to a discussion, shut the fuck up. No one actually cares about your opinion specifically. No one's sitting at their computer thinking "oh, I do hope <insert your name here> posts in this thread". Your post is not some sort of definitive point of view that will render any further discussion unnecessary. You're not some sort of forum celebrity.

6. Polls should only be conducted by forum staff. Random yahoos conducting forum polls is like those fucking idiots in Guild Wars who announce "DANCE PARTY! EVERYONE COME HERE!!1!1!!", the ones who want to be seen as "popular" and "fun" and "wacky" but end up looking like fucking twats.

7. "Search is your friend" or "the answer's here: http://www.google.com" or any other version of "try searching" are not clever, crushing put-downs or witty responses to a question, no matter how frequently-asked it may be. They're not only arrogant but also stupid and short-sighted. Consider that in the future someone might be directed to the thread as a result of the very same search that you're advocating.
"Use Google"? I did, you fucking twat, that's how I got here.

8a. Do NOT quote an epic OP in full and then add a single-line reply. And doubly so if your reply is something fucking worthless like "+1" or "this".

8b. Do NOT quote some OP and then insert your ever-so-clever counterpoints within the quote itself, especially not when your additions are barely differentiable from the original text.

8c. Do NOT quote a post, and then alter the post, and then claim you "fixed it" for the OP you arrogant, lazy, self-righteous cunt.

9. Do NOT sign your posts. I fucking hate that. Not only is your forum user name visible for all to see at the top left (usually) of the post, but most forums also have a "signature" facility for all the shit taglines and hilarious quotes that you think will amuse everyone and make you popular. I know you probably think your forum user name is incredibly clever and original, and that you secretly want people to ask you about it so you can go into all the tedious details of how you chose it, probably including a list of the MMOs you've played under that name and how other people "probably remember you" from those games because you were such a popular, skilful player. The fact is no one cares, so shut the fuck up and stop adding your name to every single fucking post.

10. The "straw man" defense is a pretentious and lazy way of admitting that you are unable to refute a given argument. It is also increasingly common to see it being used by people who don't actually understand what it means.

11. I fucking hate the increasingly-common, probably American use of "addicting". AddictIVE games are addictIVE. Similarly, "looks can be DECEPTIVE", not fucking "deceiving". And I don't give a fuck if you can find some website that says I'm wrong, because I'm not.

12. Don't ever quote a "hilarious" captcha (where available) at the end of your post. It's just some random gibberish, it's not clever or amusing to anyone but you, you vacuous fucking retard. No one else cares at all.

More to come, as soon as I think of them.

On the Subject of Forum Idiots

"Eve Wyrwal"*

I made the mistake of browsing a notoriously fractious Vanguard community forum, and now I'm seething with righteous indignation, not to mention enormous disdain for all the fucking shit-for-brains morons out there who really shouldn't even be allowed to play MMOs.
Fortunately that's why this blog exists, and this post will briefly cover a few of the more commonly contested features of past and present MMOs. I am right, everyone who disagrees is wrong. It really is that simple.

On the subject of EverQuest
If you took the golden age of EQ and launched it now, how long would it last? Naturally the fanboys and hardcore purists would have you believe it would still be the revolutionary gaming experience it was "back in the day". Fuck off, would it. The truth is the majority of players only ever put up with the more shitty and ill-conceived mechanics because there was literally no alternative at the time. Let's not forget EQ was the first 3D MMO, or at least the first to have any significant impact (before someone comes up with a predictable "uh, actually *insert unknown game that only three people ever played* came out before EQ" qualification).
Anyone who's ever enjoyed playing MMOs will have rose-tinted memories of their personal defining MMO experience. But don't make the mistake of thinking what worked in that case will automatically work now. A lot has changed since EQ. WoW has happened, and has given a lot of people a taste for gaming that is polished and efficient and doesn't force them to waste time with the tedium. You might not like that, and you might feel that they're somehow debasing your beloved genre and that the only solution is to return to the boring, laborious shit that came out before anyone bothered to give any thought to what was fun. You're no better than a WoW player, just because you played EQ. They're both just about pressing some buttons and watching an XP bar increment. Grow the fuck up, you worthless, self-agrandising cunt.

On the Subject of Fast Travel
Oh yes, the ever-popular "OMG fast travel is so carebear". I read one thread where some moron suggested that actually he would be happy if it took an hour to travel to a group, as long as there was interesting stuff to do on the way, like being attacked by bandits or whatever. What about the people who are sitting on their thumbs waiting for you to get there, you absolute fucking dick? Is it fun for them, sitting there doing nothing? Jesus fucking christ. That is such a telling post, as it illustrates the utterly "me! me! me!" attitude these people have to MMOs. Fuck what's best for the game, as long as it works in a way that gives me the opportunity to demonstrate how knowledgeable and experienced I am, because I played EQ so naturally someone of my calibre would want mechanic X to operate the same way in this game, never mind if it's actually fun or not. And if you don't like it, you must not be a very good player.
Which brings the subject back around to difficulty, which I have already treated in dedicated post. Because spending an hour traveling to a group is not difficult. It's not more "difficult" to press the forward key for an hour than it is to press "take me to location X". It's simply more time-consuming.
Which isn't to say I'm a fan of teleporting in MMOs, but the game really needs to have it's content designed in a way that minimises the necessity to zoom to the opposite site of the world at the touch of a button. Vanguard is piss-poor in this respect. The unbelievably tiresome unicorn & shadowhound mount quests are notorious for requiring you to take the longest possible journeys, backwards and forwards across the game world, just to get to yet another region where you have to grind ever-increasing numbers of the local fauna. If you're going to come up with bullshit like that, you better believe there ought to be teleporters.

On the Subject of Spawn Camping
You've got to be fucking joking. Now and again some fucking retard will lament the decline of epic spawn camps, and how much fun they were because of the social aspects of sitting around doing nothing for hours on end. Let's not forget that spawn camping is the result of a fundamentally flawed game mechanic, namely creature respawning. The concept of killing a creature, only for it to magically reappear some time in the future is ludicrous enough, but to suggest that it's actually a positive thing which should be encouraged and in fact made as long-winded as possible is abhorrent. Hey, what shall we do this evening? I know, let's go and park our characters at some boss spawn, and then do nothing. Great! And that's even before you introduce the issue of kill-stealing, because it's not like you're the only group that needs whatever piece of shit quest item or weapon or armour might, but also might not, drop. But forget instancing, because, you know, original EQ didn't have that so it's A Bad Thing.

The Field Marshal's Final Thoughts
"Hardcore" MMO purists are like the fucking Amish, stuck in the past and stubbornly refusing to accept any of the real progress that has been made since EQ. If only they'd fuck off into a little community of their own where they can be culled by the occasional psycho gunman and stop polluting the rest of the world with their shitty, worthless opinions.

* AKA "Ewa Wyrwal", or "Iga" if you're searching for MET-Art sets. Enough said.

On the Subject of PvP

Emmanuelle Chriqui

Much as it amuses me to ridicule PvP whenever possible, to say I abhor all PvP would be an oversimplification. Personally I distinguish between two forms of PvP. The style that's most popular and prevalent in existing games is what I call "competitive" PvP. It's all about the ever-popular "pwning noobs". About attempting to make up for your real-life shortcomings by spending time playing some online game to the point where you can beat someone else at it. Woohoo, you are teh leet gamer.
This form of mindless competitive PvP is best demonstrated by the likes of Counter-Strike and other pure PvP FPSes. No storyline, no real objectives other than to get a higher score than the opposition. It's simple to implement and simple for players to understand. It doesn't appeal to me, and it generally attracts an inferior class of individual. The sort of players that feel they have to win at any cost, which is why competitive PvP is usually host to all manner of cheats and exploits, across all game genres.
The alternative to competitive PvP, although it's less appropriate within the context of FPS games, is what I call "role play" PvP. PvP that occurs as a side-effect of the design of the game world rather than forms the motivation for it. This can be as simple as having a game where you can choose to be lawful or criminal, where the goals of those opposing factions generally conflict, where a criminal can advance at the expense of an honest character (as a result of theft, or even murder perhaps) and it is also possible for the honest to advance at the expense of the criminals (bounty-hunting might be an example). The point is that the conflict itself is not the sole or even primary game objective for either side. Instead it's a natural byproduct of allowing for a broad spectrum of career paths within the game, and provides an element of genuine danger which enriches the game world. The trick is to achieve that without allowing griefers to essentially hold the game world to ransom.
Perhaps the most successful of current MMOs that has a genuine role play PvP component is Eve Online. As pretty much an MMO version of the classic Elite, players can follow a range of paths to fame and fortune, whether it's through law-abiding corporate business practice or piracy. The PvP in that case is not some sort of point-scoring exercise, rather players choosing piracy as a career are adding an immersive role play element to the game and are providing a compelling alternative to some AI-driven challenge to law-abiding players.
Of course piracy in Eve will still attract the same sort of educationally-subnormal sociopaths that populate competitive PvP games, but at least it's channeled into an aspect of the game that enhances rather than spoils the game environment for the more balanced and higher-functioning players.
From what I've heard about the almost mythical Ultima Online, that game took a similar approach to PvP with players able to choose a law-abiding or law-eschewing career path which could, but (and this is perhaps the crux of competitive vs. roleplay Pvp) didn't necessarily put those players in direct conflict. That wouldn't surprise me, as UO seems to have got a lot of things right which have subsequently been ignored and misinterpreted by more modern games.
It might seem that some games blur the distinction between competitive and role play PvP but in general if there's any doubt, you're talking about the competitive style. Warhammer might feature PvP set within the context of opposing factions, where the conflict is racially motivated, but the fact is that the races simply provide "teams", and the goal of one team is to pwn the other. In Counter-Strike the teams are terrorist vs. counter-terrorist, but the game is still very much competitive.
I know a lot of people are fans of competitive PvP, as evidenced by the enthusiam for Warhammer, and I freely admit that my preference for the elusive role play dynamic is entirely subjective. Perhaps I just haven't seen competitive PvP implemented in a way that appeals to me, or perhaps it's just that competitive PvP tends to attract the sort of people with whom I don't care to play.

On the Subject of Things I Hate

#235483455: People who write reviews of games that haven't even been released yet, on Amazon or Gamestop or similar. It either means they're desperate to show off that they're in the beta, or else they're just fucking idiots. Actually I take that back,

You. Are. ALL. Fucking. Idiots.

On the Subject of Warhammer

Odette Yustman

I have always been quite dismissive of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (or "WAR", do you see what they've done there?). I've never been into P'n'P or tabletop gaming so the franchise itself means nothing to me, in the same way that I wasn't bothered about the LotR films since I've never read the books. Secondly, WAR has always traded on it's PvP credentials, and as a resolute PvE gamer I have no interest in "pwning" other players. Unlike some PvP whores I suspect, I don't have a tiny penis to compensate for.
In one of the regular "what games are you looking forward to" forum threads that always pop up in dry periods of gaming, there was post after post of predictable Conan and WAR name-checks. However, while the Conan references seem to be almost automatic now, the WAR posts appeared to be motivated by some genuine enthusiasm and excitement. I thought to myself, "Maybe I've got it wrong, perhaps there's going to be something to this after all, even for a PvE player". Which reminds me of the quote, "the only time I've made a mistake was when I thought I was wrong, which of course I wasn't".
One of the posts linked to a series of developer podcasts, which I started watching. They're entertaining enough, but sadly they ultimately reinforced my preconceived ideas about this game. There's one in particular which features an over-enthusiastic British creative director trying to explain how revolutionary the WAR quests are. Except they aren't. He bangs on and on about having to kill bears to get to a quest-giving npc who then gives you a quest to kill bears in traditional MMOs, while in WAR the bears you've already killed count. Wow, that's really revolutionary stuff. What they're missing is the fact that having any sort of quest that requires you to kill X number of species Y is fundamentally tiresome and old-fashioned, no matter how you dress it up. You could essentially achieve the same affect as WAR's amazing system by simply requiring you to kill less of the creatures. And not having to collect "proof" of kills is all very well and will reduce the frustration of having an inventory full of quest items rather than phat lootz, but is hardly a revolutionary development and in the context of an immersive world experience makes little sense. How are you proving your kill-count to the quest-giver?
On the other hand I will admit that public quests are an interesting addition. Large, narrative-driven quests that multiple unconnected players can get stuck into at any stage could be good fun. They could allow some nice big "events" to occur in the world in contrast to the necessarily limited scope of individual quests which can never really have any broad influence on the world because any number of people might be doing the same quest in parallel.
The only let down will be the repetition. This is an issue which affects every aspect of every MMO in existence, so it doesn't really count as a WAR flaw. Nothing is ever really world-changing because you have to allow for all the people who come through the region tomorrow, or next week, or next year. So your big public quest will be completed, whether successfully or not, and then it'll reset and start all over again. It's the same as having mobs respawn, which is something I frankly detest about persistent-world MMOs. For all the criticism of Guild Wars, at least you can go into an instance and clear it. You can work your way through a dungeon or region and kill every goddamn thing and have them stay dead (at least until you leave the instance). Not like non-instanced games where as soon as you've cleared one room the previous room is full of mobs again. Where you can't stop for a break because you'll get the mobs you just carefully carved your way through respawning on top of your head. Or worse, when you're wondering through a region and a dozen creatures spawn on top of you because unbeknown to you they were killed by another party 10 minutes ago. Then, when you reach the end of the dungeon you're forced to teleport out because the only alternative is killing everything you already killed, again.
I don't have the solution to that problem, and neither does anyone else it seems. It's by no means specific to WAR, just a pet hate of mine.
The other let-down was something I was already aware of, namely the style of the game. It's another vaguely cartoony-looking game in the style of WoW or LotRO. Looking at the concept art they've been producing WAR would have been a good contender for a much darker, nastier look, rather than the primary colours and hil-ar-ious jokey characters and animations they've implemented. Perhaps that's something AoC will get right, although I doubt it. I'd love to get stuck into a game that's gritty and realistic rather than some toy-town WoW clone, or the highly stylised and interchangeable Eastern MMOs. Vanguard almost got that right except the characters themselves, while not exactly cartoony, are decidedly odd-looking and distorted, in the style of Oblivion. Bennet Cross^tm-winner The Witcher did a much better job of character design, and an MMO developed in that style would be much more to my taste.
Then of course there's all WAR's PvP stuff. Bla bla bla boring old wank. Tiers, Realm-vs-Realm, capital cities you can ultimately sack, except the game will automatically and forceably reset the conflict after a sacking (see my complaints about respawning, above). And of course with PvP comes the ever-popular hacking and exploits and non-stop whining about class, or in this case Realm, balance. Have fun with that.
In conclusion, it does seem like WAR will be the PvP gamer's wet dream come true. But even the city capture elements don't exactly appear revolutionary so much as evolutionary. I was prepared to revise my opinion of the game but that has turned out to be unnecessary.
Unless, you know, there's a nice Limited Edition.