Siren's Call

Typically I play through a game once or twice (or five times, in the case of Mass Effect) and move on. There are a lot of games in my backlog that require attention so I try to keep moving forward. Unfortunately some games never end.

I've quit EVE Online at least four times now. Here's my history:

• My first stint was from June 2008 - October 2008. I was hooked, playing during the few moments between breakfast and going into the lab for work, during lunch, and as soon as I got home every afternoon. My friends and I were in a corp that had zero participation, but we had a good time between the few of us.
• Boredom struck and I lapsed until CCP offered five free days and a $10 renewal deal right at the end of December 2008. By then our corp CEO had finally left for good, leaving one of my friends in charge of all the corp assets. It was a field day and we quickly ran to set up our newly-inherited POS in Molden Heath lowsec. This proved to be incredibly beneficial for us even though the POS was a failure. A few days after setting it up, my corpmate and I were out there mining and shipping equipment to the POS. A -10.0 player showed up in a Jaguar and wiped the floor with us (Wolf + Kestrel). He mostly only spoke German but we happened to be German minors in college so we could vaguely communicate. Turns out the guy was really cool and he invited us to join his corp. So we did, and started playing PVP in earnest. A good thing too because the corp was actively scouting the region for a noob POS to bust with their dreadnaughts and ours was the next target! The corp moved to 0.0 and joined the alliance Wildly Inappropriate for a time. We left after less than one month due to a variety of reasons, then began searching for a new 0.0 alliance. We ended up helping found AGGRESSION. We tried to take some 0.0 space in Wicked Creek and succeeded for a short time, until Tau Ceti Federation showed up. AGGRO collapsed then and I faded away from EVE in August 2009.
• My friend dragged me back from February 2011 to June 2011. We joined a corp made up of old AGGRO members in a southern alliance. The alliance atmosphere was awful but we made some money and had some fun in wormholes and PVP for a bit. Eventually the Russian alliance grew too hostile to its non-Russian members so we quit playing again.
• I joined EVE once again in late January 2012 through March 2012. I left 0.0 and started up some semi-passive industry and trade work. Knowing full well how lame it can be, I tried my hand at ninja salvaging (i.e. ganking players who don't understand aggression mechanics (or who simply don't care)) to some success. I have a terrible hard time finding fights. It seems everywhere I go is empty or everyone is a pacifist. Boredom hits and I left the game yet again.

I still follow the EVE blogosphere, however, which constantly threatens to drag me back into the game. I recently read a post at Jester's Trek which turned me on to a relatively new blog called Diaries of a Space Noob. I recommend you read it from the very beginning, if you're interested. It follows the out-of-character experiences of a new EVE player who recently left World of Warcraft for our fine game of internet spaceships. It's endearing and, like so many other players, it reminds me of my early days in EVE. It's calling me back into the game and I'm not sure I can continue to resist.

The Value of Currency

I’m often perplexed by the state of in-game economies. Usually I end up with absurd amounts of cash and the shops have nothing worth purchasing, so my useless fortune grows pointlessly, laughably large. That fortune has no value because it cannot be exchanged for any tangible value.

The Mass Effect series is a recent offender (Mass Effect 1 to a slightly lesser degree). I never once worried about having enough money in these games; I was always able to purchase everything I wanted and then some. I often wonder why developers included credits (space money) in this series. If there were more compelling items to purchase (or a need to purchase supplies) the credits might have been more meaningful. As it stands, however, credits are not the primary currency in Mass Effect. Your character’s skill points are.

Oblivion represents another case of too-much-money syndrome. I found gold everywhere, but I rarely found anything worth buying in any shop, anywhere, throughout the entire game. The shops simply never sold anything better than the gear I already had, even early on. I found all of my equipment and supplies while adventuring (and I never found anything good, which is another tale). The gold economy was mostly worthless, though for some reason I continued to collect it obsessively. At least you could buy houses and furniture with it. Again your character’s skill points represent the only meaningful currency in the game.

The too-much-money syndrome is a common issue in games, but it’s more than just a balancing issue. I think it stems from a lack of intrinsic value in in-game items. This is clear in the previous examples I have discussed. Do any games handle this properly?

Consider EVE Online, where any and all player-owned items are subject to sudden, irreversible destruction. Items in that universe have value because they can be destroyed and must be replaced if you intend to continue playing. As an EVE player I always feel pressed for cash. As a side note, the vast majority of items in the universe happen to be player-created. EVE’s ISK economy is bustling as a result because players can not only create value, but destroy it as well.

All three of the games mentioned have a character skill point economy as well as a more traditional credit/gold/ISK-based economy, but only one of these titles manages to make both types of economies meaningful. Notice how the possibility of loss makes value greater? I’ve mentioned this concept before, only in slightly different terms.

Weekly Report - 08/24/2012

This is a shorter report than usual, partly because last week's report ran a few days later than normal and included the weekend.

As previously mentioned, I finished the drab main quest in Skyrim and moved on to play some of the side quests. The Thieves Guild has been occupying a lot of my time this week.

I also recently discovered the High Resolution Texture Pack DLC (it's free) on Steam. I wish I had known this existed earlier, but oh well. After downloading and installing the DLC (it weighs in at roughly 3GB) I fired up the game for some questing. Wow! The upgraded textures stand out immediately even though my loaded save is underground. The stone walls of the Ragged Cistern really pop with the enhanced graphics. My framerate has suffered quite a bit but the game is still quite playable.

I play at 1920x1080 on a 24" monitor. The in-game settings are Ultra with 8xMSAA + 16xAF, so everything is maxed out (except I leave FXAA disabled because I don't like it). My system is an i5 2500k with 8GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 560 Ti. It feels like I could use a video card upgrade since downloading the new texture pack, but I'm not sure it's worth it. We'll see. It's $300, but I'm eyeing a new GTX 660 Ti. I'd like to upgrade to a 256GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD as well, so there's another $180. I'm just not sure I play my PC enough to warrant the expense anymore (I like to relax on my couch so the Xbox 360 is used more and more).

Morality Play: BioShock

One highly touted feature of BioShock is the recurring moral dilemma of whether to free or harvest the Little Sisters. If a Little Sister is freed, the player earns a small amount of ADAM. On the other hand, the player receives a much larger portion of ADAM if a Little Sister is harvested.

Dr. Tenenbaum, the caretaker of the Little Sisters, presents these options to the player. It is in her interest that the girls be freed, and she offers an extra incentive to the player if enough Little Sisters are rescued. Remember the media fervor over this feature of the game? I suspect most journalists who decried the immorality of allowing players to make such a “barbaric, inhuman” decision never played the game in the first place, let alone paid enough attention to understand Dr. Tenenbaum’s offer.

Is it selfish greed that drives players to harvest the Little Sisters in order to earn more ADAM? Perhaps, but it’s a foolish decision. If the player frees all Little Sisters in the game, their ADAM plus Dr. Tenenbaum’s gifts (which often include bonus ADAM) handily outweigh the benefits of harvesting the girls.

It’s an interesting concept to me because the truly selfish decision is to rescue the Little Sisters since the payout is better, but this is the path that’s cited as “good” whereas harvesting would be considered “evil.” The “evil” path is not particularly selfish - it’s just short-sighted. As BioShock points out, “selfish” and “good” are not necessarily at odds.

Weekly Report - 08/17/2012

I had little time to spend on gaming last week, so not much progress was made until this weekend. This report is really a week-and-a-half report, then.

I was able to spend an hour or so each night on Skyrim, then this weekend I completed the main quest line. It was unexpectedly bland. The story is ignorable, even. Some nonsense about destiny, special powers by birth, dragons, and time travel. Most of the dialogue provided by the Greybeards and the dragons was deplorably boring; I ended up skipping a lot of it which is something I almost never do. I usually play games just for the ambiance and the story.

I'm having a lot more fun with some of the side quest lines. I'm working with both the Companions and the Thieves Guild. The Guild in particular has some entertaining quests.

Sadly, I made zero progress on Wanderlust or Chinatown Wars.

Gravity Games

I recently completed Prey, a six year old FPS from developer 3D Realms. The most noteworthy feature of the game is its interesting take on perspective. Perspective is vital in Prey, where most of the gameplay involves navigating an alien spaceship filled with expansive, twisting rooms and corridors. What appears simple at first is quickly complicated by the aliens’ gravity-altering technology. Some rooms are wrapped with “gravity belts” so Tommy can walk right up a wall and onto the ceiling. Other rooms contain gravity panels which, when activated, flip gravity around (kind of like turning the room on its side). All of these devices must be used in order to progress through the game.

I’ll admit to finding this rather disorienting at first, but it quickly became an enjoyable twist to the otherwise rote nature of most shooters. Some of the more elaborate spinning rooms kept a grin on my face as I shook my head and forged on, regardless of vertigo and a sense of uncertainty. Some of these rooms are so convoluted for the player that I cannot imagine the mind of the game designer himself.

Some high points include a puzzle that traps Tommy inside a massive cube which he must rotate using gravity panels until he can escape and the floating planetoid objects on which Tommy must land and circumnavigate to solve puzzles. It’s really satisfying to moonwalk around (literally) a tiny planet whose curvature you can actively experience (a la King Kai’s planet in Dragon Ball Z).

How the player solves this all comes down to a matter of perspective. Is the ceiling on which Tommy stands really a ceiling, or is it now a floor since he’s standing on it? What about that enemy Tommy’s shooting at, the one who appears to be standing on the wall - is he on the floor or is Tommy? Any time I encountered this situation in the game I thought of Ender Wiggin from Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card: “The direction of the enemy is always down.” When fighting in a zero-gravity environment or, indeed, a variable-gravity environment, it seems prudent to consider your target or your goal to be down. After all, it’s easier to go downhill than up.

Weekly Report - 08/10/2012

Last weekend a friend and I began Wanderlust in earnest. It’s a challenging game for us, though mostly due to player feedback issues in my opinion. We spent well over an hour trying to beat the final boss on normal difficulty. Every time we whittled him down to about 10% health, he would fly to the center of the arena and flood the screen with light which appeared to kill us. Then we were treated with a confusing cutscene about how the boss fight was “just a vision” and wasn’t real. We retried the boss over and over. We actually died a lot, but several times we made it far enough to see the “just a vision” cutscene. Could that really be the ending? After digging on the Wanderlust forums for a while we discovered that it truly is the normal difficulty ending. What a cop out. Regardless, I look forward to playing on hard for the “real” game.

I actually opened Skyrim this week! I’m about 10 hours in and enjoying it immensely. It’s not without its problems, of course. The open world gameplay is filled with distractions (I’ve spent a lot of my time smithing) and I have a hard time following any single thread of missions to its completion without being pulled in a different direction for something else. I also think destinations are too far away from each other. The world is simply too large. I’ve found a number of missions that start in Whiterun near the beginning of the game but require you to walk (!) all the way to the northwest corner of the map.

Unfortunately with all the time I spent in Skyrim I haven’t made any progress in Chinatown Wars, though I’d like to finish it off so I can move on to the rest of my unfinished DS backlog.

Mainstreaming Mass Effect

Remember how weapons work in the first Mass Effect game? If fired too often without pausing to allow excess heat to dissipate from the weapon’s mechanisms, the gun would overheat and lock up momentarily. This behavior is fully and intriguingly explained by the in-game lore: handheld weapons in the ME universe don’t require magazines of ammunition; they chip away at a pre-installed solid mineral block and fire these tiny particles at incredible velocities using miniaturized mass effect technology. This process builds up heat, however, which must be vented. Like most ME science fiction lore, this is a really interesting and plausible concept (assuming you first swallow the whole mass effect notion). Mass Effect 2 changed this. Suddenly, the weapons in the ME universe have ejectable heatsinks which become exhausted and must be replaced after a set number of shots. These thermal clips are found lying around the playable game world in random dark corners and not-so-random shelves immediately preceding each fight. The developers blatantly added ammo to the gameplay and attempted to cover it up by calling the ammo magazines “thermal clips.”

From a narrative perspective ejectable heatsinks may seem like a valuable upgrade for handheld weapons, but only if the heatsinks also naturally dissipate heat over time (a la Mass Effect 1) in addition to being quickly replaceable during a high-stress firefight. Unfortunately BioWare nixed the basic concept of a heatsink - they may be ejectable now, but they don’t dissipate heat anymore (apparently they simply trap it). Why did BioWare fly in the face of its own lore from the first game? I suspect this was done in order to more closely align Mass Effect’s gameplay with that of the most popular franchises of its day (Call of Duty and Gears of War) in order to reach a broader audience. BioWare and EA wanted to attract the millions of gamers who play shooters in addition to the RPG fans they already had on the hook. They needed to make ME2 and ME3 more familiar and accessible so mainstreamers could pick up and play more easily. Most gamers are used to collecting and using ammo, so it’s a must have. Same deal with the updated cover system. BioWare took their unique action-RPG and turned it into Mass Gears of Modern War Effect. The desire to increase your customer base is not in itself a bad thing, but this was done at the expense of poking an ugly hole in the franchise lore - and I would argue that same captivating hard sci-fi lore is largely to thank for Mass Effect’s initial popularity. Don’t get me wrong - Mass Effect 2 and 3 are great games. It’s just disconcerting what happens to games in the name of accessibility.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Valve’s frequent sales on its Steam platform are a great way to save money on games, but sometimes it’s not so great for those of us trying to reduce our backlogs. This week I discovered a new retro action-RPG called Wanderlust:Rebirth for $7.49. One reviewer named a few retro games that inspired Wanderlust and invoked the sacred title Chrono Trigger.

Any time I hear Chrono Trigger I drop what I’m doing and pay close attention. Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time, by an order of magnitude. So of course I purchased Wanderlust in response, adding yet another unfinished game to my backlog (and I still haven’t even opened the shrinkwrap on my copy of Skyrim).

That said, Wanderlust is not so much like Chrono Trigger. It is, however, quite reminiscent of Secret of Mana. As you may recall, Secret of Mana could be played in a co-op fashion with a real-life friend. Wanderlust shares this feature and expands upon it, permitting up to four players in a game.

I haven’t played far into Wanderlust yet, but I really look forward to the co-op aspect as well as the nostalgia the game is bound to evoke.

Weekly Report - 08/03/2012

Last Saturday I finished Call of Duty 3 on veteran difficulty. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the experience, but in my opinion this title is the weakest entry in the series. The voice acting is poor and the script is distant and boring. The overall sub-story of World War II being told could be interesting, but the game fails to make lasting, interesting personal connections between characters (or, more importantly, between the player and the characters). Then there’s the cheapness and buggy behavior of the gameplay on veteran, but let’s not go there.

Sunday I completed Prey from beginning to end. The game is shorter than I expected, but I had a lot of fun with it. The characters and storyline were pretty interesting; I’m surprised there isn’t a sequel yet. The gameplay itself was unexpected. The game is a shooter, yes, but moreover the levels (though very linear in nature) are filled with disorienting, gravity-twisting puzzles that rather remind me of the Portal series. I didn’t expect to really like this game, but it’s a short and sweet title that I can now recommend to friends.

So that’s it for my Xbox 360 backlog. I have beaten or completed every game I own for the system. Even though I have other systems with backlogs, I still want to pick up some new 360 games to play: Call of Duty: Black Ops, Dead Space, Dark Souls, and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier to name a few.

On the PC front I still haven’t opened Skyrim. I purchased and started playing Wanderlust: Rebirth, however, and I’m considering myself done with Torchlight. Alas, my VHHC character died to a glitchy hidden monster right at the end. But Torchlight 2 is right around the corner so I feel little need to try again.

Shoehorned Multiplayer in Mass Effect 3

When I wrote about the ending of Mass Effect 3, I mentioned how the military strength score comes into play. What I didn’t tell you then is that your military strength score is affected by a multiplier. Military Readiness starts at 50% by default, which means your effective military strength is exactly one half of your base military strength score.

Naturally, the readiness percentage can be increased. There are a few ways to do this:

• Purchase and play the Mass Effect Infiltrator iOS game
• Download the Mass Effect Datapad iOS app
• Play the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode

I don’t have any iOS devices and I have no interest in gimmicky tie-ins anyway, so the third option is my only hope. Fortunately, it only takes a few hours of multiplayer gaming to increase your readiness to 100% with relative ease. Note that an online pass is required to go this route. The pass comes with all new copies of ME3 but purchasers of a used game will have to buy a pass separately (what a smarmy move).

The first thing to notice about ME3 multiplayer is that you have to purchase and unlock equipment and upgrades using credits earned in-game. Alternatively, you can spend real life money to purchase these packs; I’m sure this is what Bioware and EA want you to do, which casts even more negative light on this whole scheme.

But that’s not all. It’s annoying enough to be pushed into what seems like a shoehorned multiplayer addon laced with microtransactions. This real kicker comes in the form of a simple question: what happens when EA decides to shut down its ME3 servers in a few years? Not only will it be impossible to play the multiplayer portion of this game, but it will become nigh impossible to earn a high enough military strength score to obtain the “better” endings in your single player campaign.

Bioware says it’s possible to earn such a military strength score without ever going online, but I don’t see how it can be done without purchasing all DLC for all Mass Effect games and starting over in Mass Effect 1 to replay the entire trilogy from scratch, making immaculate and meticulously planned decisions along the way because now you know what decisions (hint: paragon) to make in order to boost your future ME3 score.

Unhappy about the situation, I plunged into multiplayer anyway with plans to increase my readiness and get out quickly. I never expected to actually enjoy the gameplay.

As it turns out, the multiplayer mode is pretty fun. You choose a character race and class, then build that character up with abilities, equipment, and upgrades. The gameplay is purely combat-based. Each map (recognizable as the single-player campaign as the N7 missions) contains 11 waves of varying enemies which you must defeat in cooperation with up to three other players. Given the typical behavior of the average Xbox Live user, I was relieved to find that communication between players is largely unnecessary. Still, these missions would be a lot of fun to play with real friends.

I probably won’t keep coming back to ME3 multiplayer. It’s not as deep as it could have been, but on the flip side it’s not quite as shoehorned or tacky as I expected. At worst, the multiplayer mode is a mild annoyance. At best, it kept the disc in my Xbox for a few extra days and I had some fun with it.