On the Subject of Criticism

Bianca Beauchamp

It's got to the point where people seem to fall over themselves in their attempts to appear dismissive and nonchalant when it comes to games these days. Every "new" game seems to trigger the same torrent of bandwagon-jumping yahoos attempting to impress each other with how "game X was much better, back in the day, but you wouldn't know about that because you're not as old-school as me".

It also seems like some noob has just discovered The Escapist, because there's been an avalanche of references to it recently, and to "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Zero Punctuation reviews in particular.
I haven't bothered to read many of The Escapists reviews and articles, mostly because the few I have read have been uniformly tired and derivative and written in the same stuck-up tone, where reviewers will refuse to acknowledge any positive aspect of any game that dares to offend their delicate, mature sensibilities with regard to it's themes, misogyny in particular. "Oh no, this female NPC has visible cleavage, this game is worthless and must never be played by anyone".

The Zero Punctuation reviews aren't so much in keeping with the overall tone of the site, rather it just seems to be hosted there as a cynical attempt by the site's management to score some traffic. Which isn't to say they're any better of course. They're relatively amusing the first couple of times you see them, in a sort of "hur hur hur he's speaking quickly and making lots of sarcastic comments and swearing hur hur" way. The problem is, besides having a fucking stupid nickname, his reviews are an absolute one-trick pony. Hilariously tearing something apart when it's quite obvious it's a genre in which he never had any interest to start with, at high speed so as not to bore the ADD kiddies and also to disguise the fact that his hilarious analogies are little more than a very weak Charlie Brooker imitation. And the fact that he's notorious for only ever liking Portal. I mean, fucking Portal? Yeah, that was fun for 5 minutes but even then the hilarious "black humour" was starting to wear thin. It's obvious he's someone who should stick to cerebral games like sudoku or crosswords or online IQ tests, and leave childish video games to people who might actually enjoy them.

And no, I haven't missed the irony of criticising someone who's only job seems to be to criticise things.

In AoC's case the bashing obviously has a lot to do with people who claimed the game would be revolutionary and effectively make every other MMO redundant, only to find themselves playing just another fantasy MMO. Those people now feel foolish, they feel betrayed, and they take it out on the game. And then they make the exact same mistake with Warhammer. It almost defies belief that these people could be so fucking short-sighted, but when the wrath of the disillusioned migrates from AoC's forums to WAR's, just as it migrated from Vanguard to AoC, the cycle will inevitably repeat once again. I almost feel sorry for WAR's developers because the shit-storm is approaching and there's nothing they can do to stop it.

For the record, right now I'm looking forward to Far Cry 2. The environments look impressively large and free, much more so than those in Crysis even they're not quite as richly rendered. The gameplay looks fairly standard, just an FPS with a few gimmicks like the flame-thrower and some faction nonsense bolted on. Naturally I have to be wary of the fact it's also being released on the 360 and PoS3, so look forward to big, chunky GUIs, slow-motion AI that gives you a chance to get a bite to eat while you're waiting for your character to turn using a gamepad's analogue stick, and extensive narrative hand-holding. The graphics are looking pretty sweet, though, and if it'll run on a console there's hope for it being fairly undemanding on a PC. Not that that will prevent an eruption of hate on forums around the world complaining that some idiot's five-year-old box won't run it at max detail on their 30" monitor. Or that the widescreen implentation is wrong, or that the online activation is intrusive and evil and the game should be boycotted at all costs as a result.

Ultimately, being tragically critical of everything is just the forum idiot's way of attempting to garner respect from his peers by claiming to have so much experience in gaming that they're in some sort of special, unique position to judge. The most common trick is to reference other games that the reader may not have played, either because the games are old or alternatively because they're not yet released and therefore only available to people "special" enough to be in the beta. By claiming that those games are superior, the author will attempt the double-whammy of both demeaning the game in question, and also belittling the other readers.
It's a worthless tactic, because in fact no one gives a shit whether the author lives or dies, let alone what beta they happen to be in. But it's becoming increasingly common to the point of ubiquity, regardless of game genre.

Perhaps optimism will become so rare that it will suddenly emerge as the new, cool outlook for people who have the nerve to break from the herd, and we'll see forums starting to spawn posts by people who aren't afraid to enjoy games for a change.

Thought for the Day - Busty Alli

All this talk about "mature content" can only mean one thing - Thought for the Day! Featuring the ever so lovely "Busty Alli". Read it and weep, Funcom.

On the Subject of Mature Content

Perla

One subject that keeps popping up amongst the waves of shit that pass for the AoC forums is mature content. AoC was always positioned as the "mature" MMO, featuring "mature" themes, profanity, gratuitous, bloody violence and nudity in keeping with the world described in the original Conan novels. Or at least so I'm told, because I've never read them.
In practice AoC has wimped out and become pretty much a generic fantasy MMO. Yeah, there are one or two "gruesome" fatalities for some classes but that loses it's novelty value pretty quickly. I've encountered a single topless (female) NPC, who has probably already been censored out of the game thanks to an overhaul of the dungeon she inhabited. There are whores, although it's all a bit tame and implied and ends up seeming more childish and immature than if they'd just been up front with it.
The Witcher featured mature content, but managed to appear a great deal more sophisticated than AoC largely by virtue of not trying to hide the fact. It was just there, taken for granted as an integral part of the game world. Whores were whores, you could shag them but you didn't have to. There was lots of swearing that was often so well written that it was actually funny. AoC's awkward, sniggering schoolboy approach pales by comparison. Perhaps it's better off gone altogether, but then without it there wouldn't be much left to the game.

In AoC's case there's an overwhelming suspicion that the taming of the content comes in preparation for the planned XBox release of the game. Because you wouldn't want to offend the poor little chiiiildren. Waaaaah! Who will look out for the poor little chiiiildren?
To hell with the fucking children. It's bad enough that so much mainstream media is already dumbed down so as not to offend all the religious shit-sticks and legions of fucking simpletons who infect society.

Of course it all comes down to money. They musn't offend anyone lest it alienates potential customers and compromises their target demographic. Never mind the fact that compromising the very foundations of the game will similarly offend many players. Ultimately people who find the notion of nudity or violence offensive aren't going to be playing AoC in the first place, so trying to cater to them will end up pleasing no one at all. And that's what is in danger of happening.

What makes me laugh (with contempt) is when the issue of mature content comes up on a computer game forum, with people understandably asking why there isn't more tits and arse, more swearing, more sexual themes, more outrageous blood and guts in games, especially when those games are built on an IP which featured all that and more. It's not the fact that the topic arises, or that people lament the lack of adult games designed for adults that makes me laugh. It's the inevitable rejoinder from some holier-than-though fuckwit chiming in with the token "you should grow up / get a life / get a girlfriend" response. You know what, fuck-face? It's a video game forum. You can't pretend to be some super-cool, aspirational role-model when it comes to "having a life" and frequent a video game forum. The fact that you're trying to appear superior to other peeople in such a context by citing your relationship credentials just comes across as desperate and pathetic.

If there's one thing you learn on the internet, it's that for better or worse, whatever you're into, you're not alone. Frankly if you don't like to look at a nice, plumptious pair of breasts then you must be dead inside. It doesn't matter if you're male or female. So there's no reason why there shouldn't be games made for people who like a bit of old-fashioned nudity. Or why people who appreciate a bit of good, old-fashioned swearing shouldn't be similarly accomodated.

On the Subject of Age of Conan, and Vanguard

Lucy Pinder & Sophie Howard

So AoC is suffering at the moment from endless patches that break more things than they fix, as well as essentially being too quick to get to the level cap (a lot of people did it easily within the free month, which was a bit of a design flaw really), and the official forums are jammed-packed full of people whining and bitching and quitting very publicly just like they did with Vanguard.

What's funny is that some people are going from AoC to Vangaurd, and making like they've discovered some super-secret, amazing MMO that no one else knew about. I've already admitted to taking advantage of the current Vanguard free month for previous subscribers or whatever it is that's going on at the moment. I've also admitted to not being overwhelmed by the progress that hasn't really been made since I last played. Well, ok the frame rates are better but that seems to be because they've massively reduced the detail levels, especially of character models where there used to be about 10 pages of sliders to customise your look but now there are about 4, and each slider has less affect than before. And the game still hitches like hell as you run around and it tries to load assets. And the animations are still horrible.

It still has a curiously nice "feel" to the world that AoC is missing, like it's quite an immersive place to spend time, but the actual mechanics are still rubbish. I couldn't summon the motivation to play on my old characters so I made a new bloodmage, and it was going ok, nothing special, but then I reached an area where you start to find harvesting nodes, and I used to enjoy harvesting because of how you could just ignore all the quests and head off into the wilderness and discover "secret" harvesting areas. Except that's all been destroyed now by these ridiculously huge labels they've put over all the harvesting nodes which you can see from miles away.


It used to be quite tricky to spot harvestable trees especially, because they look very similar to all the others unless you hover the cursor over them at which point the cursor would become an axe. I think they used to have labels, but they were quite small and didn't appear until either you were quite close or had them selected, I can't remember which. Then you'd get more used to it and you've be able to spot them, and even which type or rarity they were just by looking.
I mean just look at that screen shot. Hmm, where can I find a weakened tangleleaf tree do you think? or some "metal", or "mineral"? It's such a simple thing but it just killed the whole game for me when I saw that. Strangely enough AoC also recently added harvest nodes to the mini-map, so of course you can never find any that aren't used up now.

Meanwhile Vanguard's in-game chat is full of "thanks AoC, without you I wouldn't be here" or "this is what EQ2 should have been" masterbatory bullshit from people who think they've got one up on the remaining AoC players, but who will soon discover that while yes, the first 20 or so levels are reasonably good fun, the game quickly descends into mindless, endless grind after that and still seems to have a lot of the bugs that it had a year and a half ago.

Of course Warhammer is the new AoC in terms of people claiming it's going to be amazing, except they've just announced they've had to cut 4 out of the 6 starting cities, and 4 classes (out of 24, across the 2 factions, I think) because they couldn't get them right or EA wouldn't give them any more time to finish it or whatever. So when that comes out the whole cycle will repeat.

Anyway up to level 42 in AoC and yes it's a bit dull, yes they keep breaking it, yes there are fewer people around every time I log in. The good thing about having low expectations for it in the first place is that I'm not disappointed.

Thought for the Day - Eve/Eva Wyrwal

Whatever, it's not like it's her real name anyway.

On the Subject of Vanguard

Some Model

It turns out there is currently a "free month" thing going on with Vanguard, and possibly some other SOE games, no doubt in attempt to suck up some of the AoC quitters. I've been seeing various "It's a whole different game to when it launched!!!111!"-type posts which are obvious lies but in the spirit of fairness I thought I'd give it a go. When the installer crashed half way through the download I knew it was the same old Vanguard.




My (second) first impressions:

• Still hitches like a motherfucker. Don't claim it doesn't. People who claim it doesn't are either lying, deluded, or don't understand what hitching is. Unless you stay in the same chunk the whole time and give it a chance to cache everything it's just painful. Of course the god-awful quest design usually involves making you cross as many chunk lines as possible.


• Higher frame rates than the old days (in between hitches), but also looks worse than I remembered.


• Still the same old soul-destroying, utterly mindless grind that EQ veterans mistake for gameplay.

And that was just the five minutes I spent in it. Plus the two characters I logged onto both sported shiny new helmets. Unfortunately my druid's helmet looks like some sort of crab claw.
Oh well, back to trying to find a Sanctum group in AoC.

On the Subject of Mods

There used to be a picture of Teresa Moore in her knickers here, and then 4 years after posting it I received a DMCA notice. True story.

On this occasion I'm referring to MMO mods, as opposed to mods like Counter-Strike. Mods that, typically, modify the user interface and don't really affect the gameplay (and not including hacks, I'm talking about mods that are effectively sanctioned by the devs who expose an API to mod authors that offers more low-level control of the interface than you might get by simply editing GUI configuration files.


There are only 2 real reasons to want to be able to mod an MMO:

1. You want some feature that the devs have been too closed-minded or lazy to implement themselves.
2. You want a competitive advantage over all the players who don't have the same mod(s) as you.

In reality it's generally more to do with (2). Mods often include more verbose feedback on damage dealt to or by the group, as well as offering shortcuts for healing or otherwise interacting with your group. I dismiss (2) as a valid reason for mods. Trying to fabricate an advantage over other players through mods is no better than "proper" hacking and just indicates a lack of skill on the part of players using them.
Which leaves (1). It's true enough that both Vanguard and AoC have pretty worthless interfaces. It was interesting to see that there's be been absolutely no improvement in Vanguard's in the last 18 months. And I admit I have been using the MirageUI for AoC, just because it offers more convenient, smaller and more numerous skill bars. That's not a competitive advantage, even if I was a competitive player, it's a simple interface improvement. But really improvements like that should be implemented globally by the developers. Rather than treating the GUI as something that it set in stone and must never be changed, as seems to be the attitude of current MMO developers, they should be more open to the notion of ongoing refinement and improvement.
In which case mods would be unnecessary. But of course we're stuck with a vocal community of players who demand to be able to run realtime log parsers or whatever other shit they used to run in EQ because they're unable to achieve anything without their precious mod training wheels.

On the Subject of Quitters

Gianne Albertoni

I've been too busy protecting the free world to spend much time in AoC recently, but I have had the opportunity to stay connected via the magic of internet forums.
The first thing that has to be said is that the official AoC forums are a complete and utter shit-fest. For a game that was supposed to be designed for, and only available to "mature" players, the number of whiny little retards running loose on those forums is quite incredible. I recall when SOE launched official Vanguard forums after their acquisition of Sigil, the general mood was fairly up-beat. While it did go through a fairly rapid decline into patronising name-calling and generally worthless bullshit, even at it's deepest depths it was never a patch on the current state of AoC's.

Now that AoC has passed the one month mark, there's a very familiar smell spreading across the forums. Namely, the ever-popular "leaving" posts. One month passed means the end of the free month for all the early-adopters, which means all the sad, poor little people with no jobs who can't afford a measly $15 a month quit after a month of freeloading.

That in itself is fair enough. If you're too lazy to get another paper-round or work some extra shifts at MacDonalds to cover what is in reality a minor expense, then good luck when you finally grow up.
Unfortunately these worthless fucks deem it necessary to pollute forums with tedious posts either a) providing long, smug, self-important explanations as to what is wrong with the game from their obviously ever-so experienced, professional MMO player point of view, or b) sneering at the remaining players and smugly bragging about how they are moving to some other, inevitably far superior game.
What they don't seem to understand is that no one gives a shit. It's a well-known fact that official games forums are largely populated with posts from disgruntled customers, and that while the overall tone is often largely negative that is often not representative of the population as a whole. People who are pissed off make the most noise, in other words, especially when anyone who dares to contradict their often wrong or illogical claims will inevitably be labeled a "fanboi".

What's particularly sad is how mind-numbingly predictable the whole cycle is. Some game gets hyped to the moon. People develop massively unrealistic expectations and begin claiming the game will be the saviour of modern MMOs, especially in "leaving" posts on the forums of some other game. Then, as the release date approaches, tales of the new game not achieving it's potential begin to emerge. By the time the game is released the "hardcore" are already over it, purely because it's no longer in beta and no longer their secret little club. It's not fashionable to like a game that the unwashed masses are able to play. Meanwhile the "sub-hardcore" play the game, realise their unrealistic expectations were, in fact, unrealistic and therefore claim the game sucks. They then post some tawdry leaving post in the official forums, name-checking whatever forthcoming game is now being hyped. And so the cycle continues.
This was especially evident with AoC. It has been name-checked by people leaving other games for years now. The new "next big thing" is WAR, but I can make two very obvious predictions regarding that particular game:

1. It will, at launch, suffer the exact same lack of content, especially at the high end, and very likely the same amount of bugs and lack-of-polish as every other MMO that has ever been released (with the possible exception of Vanguard, which had more than average).

2. It is very much a PvP game, and while that might disguise the lack of content (because in a sense the players are the content) it also means the game will be a shower of hacks, exploits and especially nerfs. If I haven't already delivered a sermon on how PvP and PvE are mutually exclusive, then I will. Expect epic forum threads from whiny little bitches crying that their class has been nerfed into oblivion, or how some other class should be nerfed because the author was soundly beaten by someone playing it. If you think the AoC forums are bad, wait until WAR is launched.

The fact is there's nothing else worth playing right now, which makes all the bitchy leaving posts sound quite hollow. There's even a new trend of people claiming they're going back to Vanguard, of all things. That's simply laughable. While the early levels in VG might provide some short-term entertainment and while I'm told there have been substantial performance and stability improvements, it's still the same pile of grind it always was, and still full of promises that have yet to be fulfilled.
So while the smug idiots proudly proclaim that VG is the next big thing, that just means they either never played it, or have forgotten how fucked-up it is, or are just lying to try to sound special.

But what is really astonishing is how people who have by their own admission quit the game continue to post on the forums bashing both the game and the people who continue to play it. What the fuck is that about? Move on, you sad, worthless little cunts. It's obvious you're just desperate to have your decision to quit validated by trying to get other people on the forum to agree with you. It's also obvious that there's nothing better out there worth playing, otherwise you'd be playing that and not spewing your shit onto the forums day after day. It's like it becomes their mission to try and convince other people to quit, so that they don't feel like the odd one out while everyone else is having fun. Ultimately it's just desperate and pathetic.

It's just a game. If you don't like it, don't play it. End of story. You're not important, your opinion is not important, and no one cares at all what you think of the game or whether or not you're even playing it. GTFO.

And you know what, I don't even want your stuff, moron.