Archive for July, 2006
Hi, folks. Welcome to this here project called: “The Unbelievers”. In a nutshell, this site provides… well, at the risk of sounding like a New Games Journalist douchebag, what we do here isn’t strictly ‘review’ games. Our take on the whole thing is to ridicule and mock them mercilessly.
Wait, that still makes us sound like douchebags. Let me start over.
Anyone ever watch “Titanic”? You know, mid-90’s movie, intolerably long, kinda sappy, and with a noticeable lack of Bill Paxton being funny. Right, that Titanic. OK. Now imagine the kind of review of Titanic that someone who absolutely hates ‘disaster’ movies would write, after being forced to watch Titanic, all the way through, five times in a row. Think of that one scene from Billy Joel’s “Pressure” video, but more cruel. And with less Billy Joel (though whether or not that qualifies as “more cruel” is up to you). It’s kind of like that.
Seriously, the idea is that everyone is biased. Everyone. You know all those lunatics screaming about how the mainstream media is full of sycophantic cronies who hate freedom (regardless of what side of the political spectrum they’re actually on)? They’re right. Well, except for the part about hating freedom. Nobody today will give you a straight answer. Everyone will only tell you what they think you want to hear– or, more appropriately, what they want you to want to hear.
We’re different. At least, I like to think we are. The basic idea behind “The Unbelievers” is that we’re playing games we hate to see if they’re really as good– or as bad– as everyone says they are. We put our bias up front, right there for you to see. We hate the game already, before we even unwrap it from the plastic. It’s up to the game itself to prove us wrong… or to confirm our suspicions.
To do this, we have to make sure we’re not making just snap judgements. So we make sure we’re committed for the long haul. Thirty days for big projects, like World of Warcraft or Dance Dance Revolution; smaller tasks (yet to be determined) will have lesser durations. Through it all, we report on our biases, our impressions, and the silly stuff that we notice about the game.
Is it going to be informative? Possibly, but reading this for a serious opinion is kind of like eating three boxes of Fruity Pebbles for your dose of Vitamin C. Is it going to be our honest opinion? You betcha.
Will there be mocking of the fanboys? Oh, so very much yes there will.
So that’s that. Please have a look at our projects, and drop by the forums– we always welcome feedback.
And one last thing: Enjoy the site for what it is. An inquisition.
July 30th, 2006
[Note: Hah, the sun is shining and there’s not a cloud in the sky. There are no fiber-seeking backhoes within ten miles of me, and I’ve sacrificed several small animals to Lord Jobs and W’oz-Loggoth. Let’s see the power go out THIS time. This update is going to happen if I have to sit next to an Ethernet port with a spark plug and a battery.]
Session Time: 3h40m spread between last night and this morning. Logged off at 10:00p, resumed at 10:30a. Advanced Ceilai from 4 to 8. Rest state indicated one and a half “bubbles”.
I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I honestly think I’m not doing something right when I play an MMO. Or rather, this MMO in particular. I have found that the quests I’m offered have become much, MUCH more lucrative once I get out of the noob garden and into what might be considered a “real” area. We’re talking jumping from rewards of 10 copper for collecting 9 items to 1 and 3/4ths silver (equivalent to 175 copper) for collecting three things. Also, I’m more apt to take a quest that has me delivering something or collecting items gained from non-combat situations than I am to take one that says “go into the den of scary monsters and slay them all”. I get more fun out of not fighting than I do out of fighting. Why the hell do I play MMOs, then?
Jonny brought up an interesting point. A lot of the reasons I said I wasn’t thrilled with WoW so far are reasons he doesn’t care for CoH. The problem, I think, is that we’re both working from different definitions and tolerances for “grinding”. So, to try to get a better idea of where he was coming from, before I logged into WoW this morning, I jumped onto my primary City of Heroes character and started going through old missions that I had never bothered to finish. Basically, I went ahead and turned the game into the most boring waste of two hours possible, because not only did I not accomplish anything, I actually managed to break the game temporarily (one of the missions was, in fact, bugged). I’ll give him that– both games have an abundance of boring stretches of just killing monsters. However, usually when I say “grinding” I’m referring to a “street sweeping mission”, where you’re charged to defeat X number of enemy type Y.
The reason I equate the two– because let’s face it, there’s not really a whole hell of a lot of difference between the two– is because those types of missions only serve to break up the long, winding level treadmill into smaller chunks. Also, they force the player to space out their exploration or utilization of some of the game’s more tailored aspects.
In CoH, instanced missions usually correspond to the level of the player (though you can outlevel the missions if you ignore them long enough– which is what I did this morning). This basically means you always have available a set of enemies at or near your level to go through. These aren’t the entirety of the missions, though, as CoH does feature “kill X of Y in common area Z” missions (but less frequently now than before). Is an instanced private mission grinding? Yes. Do I like it better than WoW, where you’re competing with every other yahoo in the world for seven Gnarlwood Mystics? Yes, because in CoH at least I know they’re MY seven Mystics, and not “whoever gets there first”. That said, I have to admit that the spawn rate in WoW does manage to keep the zones relatively populated with challenges. I had to hunt down a named monster– something Dreameater– and after I killed him, I was slain by the four Mystics gang-banging me from behind. ANYWAY, once I ran back to my corpse and revived, Dreamwhatever was back and being killed by someone else.
Now might be a good time to mention something on death. I died for the first time today. And the second. And third, fourth, and fifth times, too. Death in an MMO is a trivial thing, and I’m not complaining that I died at all. I’m actually somewhat impressed with death in WoW. There’s no penalty if you revive yourself save for the fact that you’re going to die immediately after being revived because your corpse is still being used as a chew-toy by the nine monsters what killed you.
I’m getting more used to the UI than I was before. Most of my complaints are just “I’m not familiar with it” rather than “it’s broken”– aside, of course, from the “you can’t move windows” thing. The G15 LCD does give me a slight advantage in that I can see how many inventory slots I have available to me, as well as the durability of all of my stuff at once.
As for the “sameness all over” of the environments, Jonny has it right in one as for CoH. I’d be a bit remiss if I said City of Heroes was an exemplar (ha ha) of excellent city planning. It’s piss-poor in some places. First off, there are no street names! Gah… this isn’t a criticism of CoH. What was bothering me about World of Warcraft, though, is that apparently you are the only person who is a cartographer. There’s no way to easily navigate through the areas (though in the game’s defense it might not have been bright of me to pick the darkest most confusing starting area, either). There are signposts along the road, but that’s no replacement for a waypoint system. You can apparently click on the mini-map to make a funny little noise that does nothing.
To try to see if my difficulties with players not having more clues than buttons on their mice, I decided to willingly go to the so-called “infamous” Dark Iron server. Dark Iron, it shoudl be noted, is home to several webcomic artists’ guilds including Penny-Arcade and the like. I started up a Dwarven Paladin on Dark Iron and prepared myself for the worst. There was nobody there. Might have just been the noob area, or odd timing on my part, or it could have been something else, but I saw all of three other players while wandering through and doing my first couple quests in the tundra. Including one guy who challenged me to a duel, beat the snot out of me, and then said, “heal me”. So, my choices are “idiots” or “nobody”. At least until I start teaming up, though, I’m going to refrain from any more generalizations about the populations of the servers because quite frankly, any game is going to have huge numbers of morons. There’s a relatively small number of “good” people to play with in CoH, too, and they don’t exactly make their presence known unless you know where to look.
So, that said, I’ve got to go and register for the WoW forums now.
The Good: Getting more used to the UI; good habits are starting to form. I’m more comfortable with the control scheme and gameplay flow; there are a couple more interesting quest templates (harvest X, reclaim Y which was stolen by Z). The commerce system kinda sorta works.
The Bad: The average player thus far is an unhelpful jerk who’ll attack your target for no reason other than he thinks you’re in trouble or he wants the monster for himself. Rewards seem to be uneven; i gained 850 from a single quest but 350 from another somewhat more difficult task. Scarcity of money as well as steep prices means players have to make very tough choices about their training early on before they understand the impact of those choices. You should never have to choose between armor/food and learning a new skill.
Opinion Change? Slightly better. The game still hasn’t done anything to piss me off too royally, and some of the things I ragged on it for are remarkably similar to what I liked about CoH. I suppose it’s a “deja vu” thing– I’ve already done it once, why should I do it again?– but I’ll try to curb my comparisons to CoH from here on out because they’re too similar. Instead, I shall judge World of Warcraft as it compares to Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls.
Comments for this post can also be found here.
July 29th, 2006
First off, the patch process lasted another good ten minutes after my last entry. Apparently there were five or so megabytes that they just couldn’t bear tacking on to the “get up to date from a fresh install” package that was already 455 MB by itself. And naturally the patcher refused to actually download the patch. So, had to wade through FileFront to get the patch. Not happy.
In any event, I logged in (finally!) and was prompted to select a server. Based on my suggestions of “no PvP”, the system suggested Anvilmar. Who am I to argue with the system? Actually, the other reason I chose Anvilmar was because it was the only one I could see that had a population listing of “new” as opposed to “Low” or “High”. There were others, sure, but I’m not up enough on the world lore to start RP nor am I smart enough to PvP. Anvilmar it was, then.
My first character is Ceilai, a Night Elf Hunter. She (yes, I chose a female Night Elf on purpose– I’m going to get SOME bloody enjoyment out of this game) did pretty well on her first outing; I advanced to Level 4 within the span of about forty-five minutes. However, most of that was doing really, really simple “kill x” quests. I hate those kinds of quests. I was under the impression that there would be at least a brief bit of something interesting before the game said “go grind”, but no. Right off the god damned bat I got the one type of quest I hate. “Go talk to Nerga Yabbababa”, I can handle. “Take such and such an item to so and so and tell him he’s smelly”, I welcome. “Kill X of monster A and Y of Monster B”– kill it with fire. After a while I got an ability that put the names of monsters and their locations on the minimap, so that helped– but it was too little, too late. The ironic part is, once I figured out the combat system, I briefly thought I was playing my empathy Defender from CoH.
There were some things I liked. For example, you can’t use a bow to shoot something ten inches away. That’s a nice touch. The loot system works… all right. Character customization is very nice in terms of the stuff you wear appearing on your character; and no, I will not take off all my clothes. Perverts. Actually within about two minutes of entering the game, a nasty spike of global lag prevented me from completing a quest. But once that cleared up, I was approached by a male Night Elf who was under the impression that I was a girl. When I reminded him of the fact that there are no girls playing World of Warcraft at 9pm EDT on a Thursday Night, or at any other time for that matter, he didn’t get the hint. In short, it was exactly eight minutes into the game before I was hit on. Someone else was begging for a girlfriend in the shout channel.
My God, there are six million of these people?
Ahem. After five or six quests, I decided it was time to take a look at life on the other side. I logged out and created a Tauren Shaman named Shalalah. It should be noted that I used the random name generator to get inspiration for the names, then altered them so that I felt like I had actually been creative. It should ALSO be noted that if nothing else comes of this whole fiasco, I really really REALLY like how the Taurens look. Nothing like the furious avenger of ‘ten billion served’ charging across the plains, staff in hand and magic at the ready. It’s just an awe-inspiring sight. The problem is that it’s only awe-inspiring when you’re on the receiving end. As might be inferred, Taurens move about as well as Victor Ireland used to guess release dates. They’re just as slow as they look when they’re not being all bad-ass.
Yeah, the first quests were more or less the same here, too. Change the NPC trainer name and the types and amounts of items, and it all adds up to more SUPER HAPPY FUN GRINDING!!11! However, I was exposed to a couple very odd elements of the game as a Tauren. First, someone randomly walked up to me and opened a trade window; he put something in the “enchant or unlock slot” and just stared at me. No text, no explanation, no nothing. I suppose he assumed I would enchant his whatever it was, but two things hindered this: first, he didn’t even bloody ask me first, and secondly, as I had no idea of the purpose of the “no trade slot”, nor did I actually realize that enchanting other items was a primary function of Shamans, I could not reasonably be expected to cast such a buff at Level 2. The other thing, which turned out rather well, was a duel that I was challenged to– again, without preamble and without warning. I decided “What the hell, I’ve got nothing to lose, right?” and accepted the duel, issued by a fellow Shaman. I lost. Horribly. Well, I did get a couple good hits in. But he kept spamming his lightning spell, which is what I was trying to do but I still didn’t have the hang of the keys.
I have a few gripes about the interface, though. Whose bright idea was it to prevent you from moving the UI windows? Why the hell is right-click the “activate” button, and why is there no prompt before you sell an item? I realize money is supposed to be scarce, but why do some dropped equipment items only sell for one or two copper? Furthermore, why are there no more specific error messages than “you cannot equip this item”? What in the name of all that is holy does “there is no equipment slot for this item” even mean? It’s a god damned chestplate! I’m wearing a different, inferior chestplate that you clearly acknowledge the existence of because you pop up the little comparison window! I want to remove the chestplate I’m wearing and buy the new one! It’s not hard, people! Lastly, it would be really nice if the mini-map showed me the location of completed-quest NPCs before I was right on top of them.
Some of these issues are gripes about the UI and will probably just take some getting used to. Others like the all-pervasiveness of the fetch quest will likely just serve to piss me off. Oh, and while the Rest system hasn’t yet come into play, it’s likely to be useless as the description says “one bubble of double XP for each 8 hours spent logged off”, but a “bubble” of experience (5% of the total needed to level) is just shy of two monsters right now.
There is native support for the Logitech G15 Keyboard and its LCD screen. About a year back a few people had been beaten with the banhammer for using the keyboard; its use has also been mentioned as ‘abusable’ in terms of CoH. However, I’m glad to see that Blizzard– and Cryptic/NCSoft, as well– gives players the benefit of the doubt that they won’t just become a bot. I still have to fiddle with the keybinds and my Nostromo loadout, but for the most part I’m digging the controls.
Session Time: Two hours. Levelled from 1-4, 1-3.
The Good Things: Very nice graphics and cinematics. Difficulty is not too tough, but monsters put up a fight. Tooltips and help prompts for everything. Quest kill counters appear on screen. Native support for the Logitech G15 keyboard.
The Bad Things: UI is unintuitive/counterintuitive. Audio is 2 steps shy of obnoxious; voice acting is copied directly from Warcraft III. Quests are uninteresting and not compelling. Areas are very hard to move around in due to sameness all over; lack of nav compass/waypoint system adds to this. Yeah, the noob zone is populated by morons; reserving judgement on people in general until later. Tooltips and prompts for everything; “helpfulness” borders on obsequiousness.
Opinion Change? Slightly for the better. It plays a lot better than I had thought, but the hiccups and grinding turn me off from the thought of seriously extended play.
Comments for this post can also be found here.
July 28th, 2006
6:55pm: WoW installs on five CDs. That’s all well and good, except for the fact that the installer scared the hell out of me four times. See, instead of the benign little “ding” you normally get from a program saying “Hey dipshit, insert the next disc because we were too lazy to offer a DVD version for everyone”, WoW uses a very ominous-sounding THOOM. At random times. While I’m doing other stuff witing for the install. Like, you know, eating. Or giving myself the Heimlich from the last gorram time it THOOMed at me. In any event, the final install time was 40 minutes.
Then I went through the account setup process. Pretty straightforward; the Blizzard site is secure, which is always a nice thing to be. At least one form of payment is required before they let you go forward, and believe it or not even if you want to use a Game Card that you’ll purchase once you’re sure you haven’t just wasted $30-$50 on five disc-shaped turds you still need to have the card right there. CoH/V doesn’t require you to have the card; they believe you when you say “I’ll wait and see”.
So after that, and then trying three different account names (I couldn’t use either of my primary aliases, so I had to fall back to a variant of my old AGFF name), I finally had a working account. I was ready to rock! I started up the game and watched the damn pretty opening movie. “Ooooooh,” I said. Yes, I did actually say that. Blizzard has always been good with the cinematics. I was digging it as it ran, and was actually excited to log in once I had the chance to. I did so and waited for the first patch to download, which I fully expected.
7:08pm: And download it did. After unblocking the Blizzard Downloader (about the only good thing XP’s ever done was to ask you to permit programs to go Outside) I figured it would only be a short while before I could play. Well, that was twenty minutes ago and the Downloader says I still have 75% to go. Here’s the thing– the patch they’re downloading is 454 MB. ‘Round these parts of the Interbutt we don’t call that a “patch”. We tend to call that THE GOD DAMNED SIXTH DISC. If Blizzard is producing new copies of the game, why are they not releasing them with marginally more up-to-date versions of the software? The box I got had Version 1.0 of the software. And obviously it’s not a first-run of the game; it has a “Game Of The Year” sticker on it! The lovely part of all of this is that the Downloader does use BitTorrent technology. While that would be a comfort for me, as the patch is downloading a hell of a lot faster than the CoH/V patches/updates do, I dislike the idea that there’s no way within the program to specify different ports. I’ve had my suspicions that SpeakEasy’s packet-shaping BT traffic on the default ports, as the usual reasons for me to use BT (fansubs, lol animu) tend to be not good on the default ones, but this pretty much confirms it.
7:21 pm: I’ve spent quite a while writing this, and I’m only at 40% now. MUST. GO. FASTER.
7:34 pm: 66%. Thrill to the awesome power of liveblogging totally pointless and stupid things!
7:43pm: 84%. Ironically “about seven minutes” is both the time left on my download and the amount of time with WoW that I’ve enjoyed myself thus far.
7:47pm: 91%. I have been reduced to singing the Download Hash code to the tune of Old MacDonald. “Dee seven two seven eff cee two… six five aay three cee!”
7:51pm: Completed, now patching. Let’s have a look at these patch notes, huh?
“You will no longer fall through a chair you are sitting in if you eat or drink.”
8:01 pm: All right, most of the patch notes don’t make any sense whatsoever to me. Except the eat or drink one. That’s just plain wrong. After all, depending on how much you drink, there’s always the chance that you will fall out of your chair. Anyway, finished patching, so let’s log in for reals.
No more updates tonight, but tomorrow I’ll take lunch and have a good idea of how the first night in Azeroth went.
Comments for this post can also be found here.
July 27th, 2006
Game: World of Warcraft
Genre: Traditional Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game
Developer: Blizzard
Publisher: Blizzard/Vivendi
Platform: Windows/Mac OS X
Trial Period: July 27, 2005-August 27, 2005
I was first introduced to World of Warcraft as most of the members of the DDR Erie crew began gravitating towards it at launch (fall of 2004). I was not-playing City of Heroes and Final Fantasy XI at the time (read: I had the games but had let the subscriptions lapse due to lack of interest) and was quite unwilling to join a new MMO when my previous experiences, which included stints in Everquest and Ultima Online (lasting two months and five days, respectively), had burned me so badly. Now, let it be known that I trust the judgement of these people. The Erie crew was made up of some of the least-biased, most intelligent gamers I’ve ever met– all of them. However, at the time, I thought they were total noobtards for getting into a game that was so ‘popular’ you couldn’t even play it when you wanted to; you’d get shunted into queues to even log on.
It’s now two years later. WoW has absolutely dominated the MMO market, gaining well over 50% market share by itself, and without the virtue of any expansions (The Burning Crusade has not yet been released at the time of this writing). Six million players worldwide, with half a million on at any one time– by comparison, City of Heroes/Villains has a total subscriber base of only two hundred thousand or so– so many people can’t possibly be wrong, can they? American Idol aside, I decided that as the price of the startup box had dropped, now was the best time to try the game.
My primary problems with the game, and the reasons why I had resisted, were all based around one thing– the sheer size of the player base. In any population as large as that, there are bound to be a huge number of idiots and griefers. As an extension to this, the huge number of foul-play players undoubtedly must make the game almost impossible to police properly. I have this vision in my mind of a bloody battlefield, with thousands of players’ corpses, more produced every second as a small cabal of high-level players sweep through the ‘noob’ zone for no reason other than they don’t want to grind anymore. As an added bonus, they players did seem to get the upper hand on the developers at least once– on one particular server during an event called “The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj” which centered around the opening of said gates, a player group completed the quest necessary to open the gates to all other players, but refused to do so until Blizzard acknowledged certain supposed glaring bugs. Furthermore, if I have to spend even five minutes in a login queue, I will bitch about it. Very loudly. My theory is this: a large enough player base actually reduces the immersion an MMO player has in the world, as through login queues, zone oversaturation, and GM nonresponsiveness, he or she is made to feel increasingly insignificant; basically, either you are one of six million players of WoW or one of ten billion humans on Earth, both of which make you feel pretty damn useless.
Next, the game seems created specifically for Player Vs. Player combat and thrusts people into that setting immediately. Granted, all games involve some degree of PvP competition. The problem is that PvP and griefing seem to go hand-in-hand as players seek out new ways to piss others off deliberately. I’ve been told that there’s a significant PvE (Player Vs. Environment) portion to the game, but then again that’s no good either as it basically relegates the game into greed-driven grinding. Partying with people becomes excessively taxing as well because whenever you have a situation where people have to share loot, there will be Drama. The Warcraft setting (Horde Vs. Alliance) naturally predisposes players into the PvP mindset, which I don’t like due to the potential for abuse. My theory is this: Forcing players into a PvP combat situation is akin to forcing players to be griefed; conversely, restricting players from PvP forces them into mindless grinding without any purpose. World of Warcraft does not provide enough PvE variety or non-combat PvP competition.
Finally, I remain skeptical about Blizzard’s promise that “even casual gamers will be able to enjoy all of the game”. The gaming world was in an uproar while WoW was in development due to a system called “rest”: basically, the longer you stayed logged in, the less effective your character was. It’s supposedly undergone some changes since then and has been hailed now as a “good thing”. What has caused such a reversal of the public opinion? It is important to give players an incentive to take breaks, but if it comes at the cost of effectiveness for the so-called “hardcore” players who spend days on end logged in and grinding, there will be an outcry. My own play style seems to be a hybrid of this– I’ll play sparsely during the week, usually at night, but spend most of the weekend in-game. As a result, I’ll likely see both sides of this. My theory is this: the “rest” system does nothing to contribute to casual players and in fact serves as an artificial hindrance to the “hardcore” crowd, who will overcome this through tedious grinding.
The game’s being installed as we speak, on my primary PC; I may also tinker with the Mac OS X version at some point. As soon as I have details about who and where I am in the world, I’ll post them.
Comments for this article can be found here.
July 27th, 2006