How population affects the world

Some quests are better with an empty world. The lone hero who saves everyone quests in particular work best when there isn't someone else also around saving the world. Waiting in line just gets to be ridiculous. "Excuse me, sir, but could you hurry things up a bit? I also need to destroy this threat to the world." Kills and spawns can get silly too when you've destroyed the threat to the world, only to have it pop back up again and fight you while you're riffling through its pockets. This gets doubly bad when the next guy in line to save the world has to wait because you've gone and tagged the threat to the world. It's not as if shared kills solve this, as then we end up with a handful of Lone Saviors of the World teaming up to repeatedly kill the threat.

On the other hand, if things are too empty, then quests can get to be too hard. Many quests with elites are of this sort. Many of those are gone. This can still end up looking silly, because the quests were clearly designed for multiple players involved and went from being a significant accomplishment to being lame. I'm looking at you, Jintha'Alor. On a side note, not only was that place tricky to run at level, but it's also the worst Archaeology spot in the history of ever. Quests for mass killing are simultaneously well- and poorly-suited to a high population. On one hand, if those rats/orcs/rarcs are such a problem, then it makes sense that there would be a ton of people hired to kill them. It makes it feel a bit more like a war/magically oversized pest control when you have a dozen people busily killing them. Yet this depends a great deal on the spawn rate: if they come back quickly, then all is good. But, if the respawn is slow, then you have a bunch of guys standing around drinking coffee and yet, none of them claim to be supervising or on break.

Population variance can take a turn for the comical, utterly ruining the quest, but creating an equally-great situation, if only you can see it from the right perspective. For example, Westfall is meant to begin with an investigation into a murder. This should mean the lone player carefully questioning various vagrants, possibly bribing them, a feature that I believe all quests should have. In practice, it means racing people for the opportunity to punch a homeless person. Perhaps not what the developers intended, but it works just as well. And the ragamuffins have a field day.

In defense of big, bright exclamation points

QUEST HERE! I HAVE A QUEST FOR YOU! MAKE SURE YOU GET MY QUEST HERE BECAUSE I HAVE A QUEST!
are you done yet? you don't look done. maybe you need to kill some more bears.
YOU'RE DONE! THAT'S SO GREAT! I AM VERY HAPPY THAT YOU ARE DONE AND I AM GOING TO GIVE YOU A REWARD IF YOU COME TALK TO ME!

Let's ditch that weirdo and instead get into the world, yea! Let's go talk to this guy, see what's up with him. It is nice weather indeed. That's cool. It's like a world. In the real world no one has quest markers, you have to talk to them to get a job. How about this guy? Kids died in the war. That's sad. I wonder if I can visit his kids' graves and drop off flowers for him or something? No? I guess I am a complete stranger. That's realistic that he has nothing for me. Maybe this guy. How's it going? Need to me to shoot any bears? Yes? Great, I'll get right on that.

Yep, these bears are so dead and this world is so awesome. I mean, none of those weirdos with the shouting and then whispering and then shouting some more. Pretty great. I kill those bears, sir. Thanks for the firewood, I mean family heirloom.

Hi! I'm an adventurer in search of adventure. Do you have any for me? No? Okay. Hello over there. You don't talk, got it. You, fellow, how are you today? Winter is coming? Yes sir, it is. Hello ma'am, do you need any help with anything? Going to the well? I could carry some buckets for you? No, you have it covered? No one fell in?

*unsheathes sword*

LISTEN TO ME: I am not here to socialize with a bunch of scripted idiots. I am here to get excuses to kill stuff. Unless you are going to give me something in exchange for killing something else, I do not want to talk to you. I'd prefer to not even look in your direction. The next person who looks at me and doesn't have a quest to kill stuff or carry stuff past people who I get to kill will die.

QUEST HERE! I HAVE A QUEST FOR YOU! MAKE SURE YOU GET MY QUEST HERE BECAUSE I HAVE A QUEST!

Thank you, insane shouting man.

Even More Immersion Breaking

Blizzard support RPs outside of the game as well. This is ruining my out-of-game immersion.

I don't care what the code says, I want to kill him

Every day, millions of people walk through virtual cities and commit no acts of violence. None at all. Outside the gates of the cities they engage in the wholesale slaughter of everything in sight. They may kill hundreds, even thousands of people and creatures in a single day. Yet inside the cities they're as gentle as a highly medicated lamb who is in no distress.

Is this plausible? Let us pause for a moment to remember the distinction between realism and plausibility. It is not realistic that these people can summon demons or effectively teleport by running really fast. However it is entirely plausible. Yet it is neither realistic nor plausible that these people are so peaceful.

These are not soldiers, trained and disciplined. Even if they were, it's not as if soldiers become peaceful lambs when they're on leave. Either way, these are all heavily-armed and powerful individuals with a habit of extreme violence. They've killed thousands for a 20% discount. Or we to believe that out of the millions of people there was not one who felt a twinge of violence?

One person was angry that a limited supply item was not in stock. One other was angry that the items were too expensive. How many have been annoyed when the auction house or trading post takes a large cut of the sale? Yet none of them were inclined to even try violence, their otherwise universal solution to all problems.

It is, of course, entirely plausible that they'd try and fail. We'd see them charging up a spell or taking a few shots, fail to kill their foe, and be subdued by a dozen guards and a hundred players. We'd see them shouting at a vendor, threatening force, and end up in jail for a little while. We never see this.

This brings me to Fallout 3. Violence is my primary means of fixing problems. It is not the only means, but I rather enjoy killing bad people. Thankfully, it is almost always available. While the game does use karma to measure my killing, it only passes judgement, rarely does it restrict.

A lady dressed up as an ant and attacked a town. I talked to her briefly to see if it was just a reality show or maybe a temporary fit of insanity brought on by a bad batch of Jet. Then I blew her head off. I hate ants. I hate people who cease being human even more.

I once tried a peaceful solution. Mostly. With some convincingly intimidating speech I drove out some bigots and thereby allowed some ghouls to move into a nice place. All seemed good. Maybe peace works after all. Later I returned to buy ammo, since it turned out to be a good source of sniper ammo, which is hard to find. All the humans were dead, even the nice ones, such as the badass adventurer who had a ghoul friend. It turns out there was an argument, so the ghoul leader killed them all. He claimed that he didn't need to answer to anyone, especially a "smoothskin", their derogatory term of non-ghoul humans. I blew his head off and ignored the supposed karma loss. As penance I slaughtered a town of slavers. And robbed the weapon store, not because I needed the money, but because it seemed like the right thing to do.

That town had quests in it, the slavers even gave me one. You might expect that that would make them considered essentially and unable to be killed. Thankfully, Fallout has a radical idea: you don't have to actually be able to do all the quests. If you want to fail a quest because the quest giver was a horrible person, feel free to shoot him.

Only the central story line is essential, probably because it is needed to unlock a few areas. Characters for that can't be killed. Well, most can't. Some can because the game thoughtfully gave them computers in which they can store the information I need.

I don't normally kill everyone in sight. I like having good karma. And I made that mistake in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, killing off rude shopkeepers. Then I had no one to sell my legitimately-acquired loot to. I did, of course, have a fence for my less-legitimately-acquired loot.

Yet even if I don't feel the inclination to kill Moira, even as she attempts to be doing the same to me with her mirelurk research, having the ability to do so makes the world feel much less like a game. Being able to make bad decisions, even if we recognize and avoid them, makes a world feel more realistic and more plausible. It is not plausible that characters created to commit violence are unable to do so.

MMORPGs are virtual theater based on single-player games

Syl hates stories (author note: I might be distorting her words for dramatic impact).

The problem with MMO storytelling is that developers treat MMOs like single-player games where other people happen to be around.  Every word puts me in the center of the action, makes me the fulcrum, makes me the hero who changes everything.  That's not a problem!  The problem is that the words are entirely disconnected from the reality.  A million other people have saved, are currently saving, or are about to save the world from the exact same threat.

I've come to a revalation about MMORPGs: They're fake worlds.  I don't just mean that they're fake worlds in the sense that they're simulations on a computer, but that even within those worlds we're all faking it.  It's been obvious all along, and yet we failed to see it: we're not the heroes.  Stick with me on this journey and I will blow your mind.

Pick your virtual world.  I'll use Azeroth because everyone has been there (except losers, losers).  It has definitely been threatened.  Dragons, Old Gods, demons, and gnomes have threatened to tear it apart.  We've stepped in to save it.  Or have we?

No!  There were other heroes.  They got there first.  They came before us and killed the dragons, Old Gods, demons, and gnomes.  Some other people saved the world.

We're just people pretending.  Not pretending at our computers, but pretending in the game as well.  How else can you resurrect at will?  How else can enemies respawn?  Why do enemies follow the same script?  The only content that is unscripted is PvP, which takes place in small spaces, isolated, with no impact on the world.

We're actors.  We dress up and go off to fight a fight that has been staged and scripted.  The outcome is pre-determined.  If we seem to fail, what happens?  We start over and we do it again until we've gotten it right.  When we pull the director yells "action!" and when we wipe he yells "cut!", then he gets on vent, pretending to be the guild leader, and yells at us.  Finally we get the scene right and the footage is saved.

A long time ago someone saved the world.  More recently, someone made a movie about it, using us.

The real question is: Do our characters know?

Does your game world exist outside quests?

Items
"Find a penny, pick it up, then the next day have good luck."  Or in the MMO universe, "Find a quest item, you can't pick it up, maybe next time around you'll have better luck because you'll have gotten the quest first, noob."

"Does this thing exist?"  In the real world this leads to all manner of philosophical musing, mo less than most of it utterly useless.  In the virtual world the answer is complex.  An item may exist, but what the existence is may change.  Without the relevant quest it may be in a mob's inventory, waiting to appear.  Or it may be an object on the ground, with appearance and may even physical interaction with the world, yet it cannot be picked up.  In some very rare cases the item is a quest item and it will exist with or without the quest, but the quest is merely piggy-backing off non-quest items, such as turning in gold or trade materials for reputation.

If a quest requires an item to be picked up, what should the item be without the quest?  The developers could leave the items out, waiting to be picked up, regardless of whether the players has the quest.  Then it becomes an inventory issue.  Are players going to fill up bags with currently-useless junk?  Can they destroy the quest items, rendering them incapable of completing them later?  Will quest items take up no capacity?  That can end up looking strange if the quest item is more than pieces of lint, which is itself rather strange.

If the quest item does not exist yet or cannot be interacted with without the quest, then the world itself is altered by the presence of the quest.  At times this may have an explanation, such as if you previously lacked the magnifying glass needed to see the pieces of lint.  At other times it instead appears that your character is magically blind or utterly incapable of expressing any interest or interacting with particular items in the world, until someone asks about them, and then no longer once the questions end.

This latter method is most glaring when the item has little reason to have not been there before.  While the quest may explain that the villain fled and left something behind, it often does not.  Even worse, you may go through an area and kill the villain, but he leaves nothing behind without the quest.  Seemingly immobile items, such as tools in an abandoned factory, may or may not be there depending on the quest, suggesting that Quest Gnomes are sneaking into abandoned factories to leave tools, which means that they should properly be called not-so-abandoned factories.

Phasing
In WoW we saw the rise of phasing.  While it is a neat idea, and makes sense, that the world would change in response to player actions, that is not actually what happens.  It doesn't matter if you kill a billion mooks and bosses, your side will never advance.  Instead, they will advance after you complete the quest that calls for you to kill ten mooks and maybe one boss, though those only count if done during the quest, and killing extra has no impact.  The world is nothing without the quests.

Story
*muttering to myself* "What's going on here?"
Nearby exclamation point guy: "Let me tell you, brave adventurer!"
Me: "I'd like to figure it out for myself."
NEPG: "HA!  You can't."

In a mystery novel you may be able to piece things together.  You might figure out the villain before the big reveal.  You might anticipate the villain's next move.  The facts may be there to figure things out, but lack the narrative structure and analysis needed for less-brilliant readers to figure things out.  Or there may be some facts missing, so that competing theories cannot be eliminated yet.  Despite the incomplete story, it is still there and you can create a narrative, perhaps incomplete or even wrong, but based on something.

Quests tend to hijack this process.  The world is presented, but it is nearly a blank slate.  It is merely there.  You cannot ask it anything, you cannot investigate.  There is nothing more to learn.  There is certainly not enough to form any sort of explanation for why it got to be as it is.  Instead there are quests.  They explain why it is how it is and how to change it to what it will be (though with likely no mention of how you want it to be).

It is like playing Clue, but rather than seeing that the victim is the maid, with a bloody candlestick nearby, and a trail leading down to the wine cellar, you instead are told that the maid has died and you are sent to investigate the body, leading to a quest in which you look for nearby blunt weapons, which are of course sparkling ever so slightly, and then you're prompted to follow the trail of blood, which is also sparkling and you may not have noticed until someone nearby who is apparently paralyzed in a standing state or is a faceless voice in your head prompted you to follow it.  Then in the basement you find the butler with a gun and a dozen armed minions, yelling in large red text about how he'll kill you for interfering, while the previously-mentioned paralyzed man or faceless voice do nothing at all.

Are flight paths just lag?

I quit playing Civilization V for a while.  I didn't quit because of the economic problems or the roads costing too much or anything wrong with the game mechanics.  Instead, I just got tired of the performance.  It runs slowly.  Saved games load slowly.  Turns run slowly.  It's all slow.

I was spending a lot of time playing without playing.  Not much fun.

It got me thinking, is this any different than a flight path or any sort of travel time?  Waiting for games to load and AI to move is just that, waiting.  It's not a time of contemplating the difficult tactical decisions that the AI must make (usually incorrectly) or a recreation of the slow communication and slow history of days gone by.  It's just waiting.

So when I get on a flight path and it tried to take me from Orgrimmar to Silithus and I'm going to be waiting for 10-20 minutes (I don't remember, but it's long (which is what she said)), am I seeing the scenery and feeling a sense of distance and size?  Am I in awe of the size of the world and the magical feeling of flight on a magical creature?  Probably not.  More likely I'm tabbed into another window playing TERA (if ya know what I mean (but not that way (seriously that's fucked up, why would you even joke about that?))).  Or I'm tabbed out writing blog posts about flight paths and wondering if they are the same as lag.

Maybe they are different though.  Lag is something broken.  Yes, I know that computing takes time, but in Civ IV everything happens somewhere between instantly and almost instantly, and completely different games (with much prettier graphics) run much more smoothly, whereas Civ V has uniquely bad performance.

Flight paths aren't a technical problem.  They're intentional design.  They're something that developers chose to put there, for some reason.  They're designed to be there, taking scenic routes, adding that sense of world.  They aren't so scenic and worldly after a thousand flights, but without the first one, you're playing Zone of Warcraft and ZOW is a pretty lame game.

I want to shoot him. Let me shoot him.

ESRB Warning: Any sense of choice is merely an illusion.

Welcome to Star Wars: The Old Republic. It has some great story-telling.

Meet Tyresius Lokai, a slimy rodent who I really want to kill. I think they did a masterful job with this guy. He's a serial scammer who has managed to piss off pretty much everyone. Bounty hunters are sent to go kill him. And off they set, guns ready, and hoping to catch the previous guy who failed to do the job. Well, we meet him, and guess what: he's been bought off. Sold his ship and now hangs out with sexy twi'lek babes, doing what anyone else would do if loaded with credits. He's not the first to get bought off, since Mr. Slimerat got pretty damn rich with his tricks.

Finally though, I have him. It's been a long chase, but his droid is dead and my gun is ready. He offers to buy me off, throwing me what I think was a box of credits. I'm immoral, but that doesn't mean I'm unethical. This guy is going down. Beside, he's annoying. Whoever wrote this quest chain did a masterful job of making me hate him. I refuse the offer and he sets dogs on me.

But he's out of time and space. His ship isn't ready to take off and my blaster is ready. Time to get paid.

By him.

Even if I really want to kill him, even if I have already rejected his offer in order to kill him, I cannot kill him. Nope. I am magically compelled to take him on as a companion. That makes perfect sense! Why wouldn't I suddenly drop all my hatred and take on a huge risk like that?

Of course the game won't let me break my story. I mean, their story. That's fine. But is this really the only possible way? Did no one suggest the option to shoot him and as part of my reward I get to hire (for free) a companion which is exactly the same as him? It felt like I'd been playing a racing game and suddenly they replaced the finish line with a wall.

Not happy.

I'm looking forward to the trial or f2p.

Medal of Honor: Now with Beards

Do you remember my review of Homefront? Well, this game has a similar "doesn't feel quite right" vibe to it. But it is not a worthless pile of crap either. I would recommend it, just not at full price.

I think the problem is that I thought it would be realistic. This was probably stupid of me, since a realistic portrayal of war would be a lot less fun.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my impression of war in Afghanistan involves a lot of the following:
- IEDS
- Trying to not shoot civilians
- Having a really hard to identifying civilians

I as a player never had to deal with any of these.

There were a lot of scripted events that included these or similarly unfun problems in war. In one cutscene a trigger-happy general ended up having us fire on Afghan soldiers. There were a couple scripted bits involving rigged objects, such as corpses and huts.

I as a player never had to wonder if something was rigged. I ran where there were no bullets and that was about it. Maybe this is because of gameplay. It would be a bit frustrating if there were random IEDs that could kill me. It would be pointless if they were in fixed locations that I could just remember.

I never wondered if I might shoot a civilian. If there was any uncertainty, it was scripted, and merely waiting would yield the answer. While waiting I was not in danger. The closest to this involved a few areas where I was shooting with friendlies nearby, which can be hard to identify if I am using heat vision. But that's okay, friendly fire seemed to either do no damage or was small enough to not matter.

To top off the strangeness of it all, while I could always perfectly identify enemies, the intel we acted on seemed to be absolute garbage. They expect a few guys and there is an army. This created a lot of dissonance for me.

Speaking of armies, I was not expecting the Taliban and Al'Queda fighters to be so willing to run straight into my shots. Sure, some of them are fanatics who want martyrdom, but it appeared that 99% of enemies were hoping to die while the remaining 1% were in charge of retreating and getting shot in the back. I know that Afghanistan had some of the traditional style of war: "a bunch of guys with guns shoot at each other for a while", but I don't think I ever dealt with a hit-and-run or any ambushes which did not involve at least 30 enemies who of course all died. Not a single suicide bomber.

It was symmetric warfare: what they lacked in technology they made up for with numbers. Lots of numbers. I'd have my fancy guns and awe-inspiring air support and they'd have lots of people. As best as I could tell, the US had around ten thousand soldiers and the Taliban had around ten bajillion. I suspect we were secretly fighting the Chinese.

I ran into a few bugs. Nothing disastrous, but annoying of course. At one point the Taliban units didn't all spawn, so they couldn't all die, so I couldn't advance, despite the area being clear. Going to the previous checkpoint fixed that. At another point, it seems that one of the kills was part of a scripted event: grab guy and bash his head, then drop down. But for some reason it was possible to find a gun before that point, which seemed to disable the bash guy's head script, making it impossible to move forward.

On to the good parts:

The stories are pretty interesting. I won't spoil them, but I felt like they tied together well. Everything felt connected, with a real sense that what one group was doing was not isolated, but was part of a network of support and cooperation. In this aspect it felt a bit more like a real war than the random and disconnected campaigns from the standard "shoot a million Nazis" WWII FPS.

In general, beside the one general, the American forces looked totally badass. Pinned down? Air strike is there in 30 seconds. Still pinned? More air strike. Still pinned? There is an American badass a second away from killing everyone. Maybe this as the true point of the game: to make America look badass. Of course it also looked incredibly expensive (precision munitions aren't cheap!), but definitely cost-effective, especially if we consider that until you bomb a bunker it has unlimited reinforcements. Though there was the one mission where, as best as I could tell, we lost the entire ground army except for eight guys, four of whom were not present at the battle. This might explain the ready availability of air support; there are hundreds of aircraft supporting eight people.

The gameplay itself is pretty good. In general I found myself using the given weapons, usually some sort of American gun. But at a few points I found myself picking up other guns due to being unable to get to anyone to beg for ammo. There is enough variation in the guns to be worth a little thought (though not a ton). When I had a machine gun, I took advantage of the huge capacity, a necessity given the long reload time. I often didn't use the sights, because if my goal is to throw lead in a general direction to keep people scared, accuracy seemed pointless. In contrast the assault rifles had me firing in more controlled bursts. The shotgun got some use near the end, when I found myself short on ammo, unable to get to allies, and unwilling to trade my scoped gun for an enemy gun with just iron sights.

The ammo was a mixed bag for me: given that there are a few infinite respawn parts, it was nice that friendly AI could give me more ammo. But it also seemed a bit strange that they are apparently all carrying a billion rounds. Overall I thought it was a decent compromise: I can only carry so much and have to take some care, but I won't find myself getting saved at a checkpoint with no ammo.

As would be expected, the game is on rails, but they aren't quite as narrow as I expected. There is some side to side room for maneuvering, which could lead to actually choosing different tactics rather than just "shoot better". The health system is the popular "wounds heal very quickly" system, which I like. I also appreciated that checkpoints are not too widely spread. I am easily annoyed by repeating long scripted elements and for the most part, I did not have to.

The friendly AI can actually contribute. At one point an objective was completed by the AI getting the last kill. Of course I still need to "push" the group to keep it moving, but that seems reasonable, since these guys aren't big on leaving anyone behind, particularly when there are only eight guys left.

As for the enemy AI, it isn't omniscient, though it does seem more perceptive than I'd expect. It won't see out the back of its head, but often out of the corner of its eye. That's fine by me, since it means I can move around a bit and flank them without things getting silly. In contrast, compare the extremes where the AI always knows where you are, or in Splinter Cell: Conviction where it will remember a last known location, and then obsess over that location, going straight for it without seeming to consider that the player can move.

The single-player campaign took about 4-6 hours. I know that is broad. I forgot when I had started playing. It was daylight savings and my sleep clock had decided to take advantage of the time change by screwing up my sleep horribly. I was on around 4 hours of sleep, so please pardon the inexact game time.

So overall, I'd recommend this game if you like shooting people and need to lose a few hours. But don't pay $50 or whatever they charge these days.

Realism, Simulation, Immersion, Choice, and Accuracy

Nouns!

Realism! Check out the details on this gun. This game doesn't have to be 20 Gb, but if you want guns that look this good, then it does. You'll want a new video card too. Newer than that one. What do you mean I don't even know what card you have? This is a new, realistic game, of course you can't handle it!

It seems to me that when developers talk about realism they aim for visual realism. They make it look like what it is supposed to be. Presumably looking like it is good enough. But if visuals and sound (I forgot sound) are all it takes, then we'd all have PTSD from all those war movies. And from the similarly visually stunning FPS that they keep churning out.

Visuals do not guarantee immersion.

The problem is simulation. What is being simulated? I'm reminded of the 'simulator' we had for driver's ed back in high school. We'd all sit in our little driver's seats with a decent recreation of a steering wheel, gear shift, turn signal, pedals, and other stuff which I'm sure is important (aren't you glad I don't drive much?). It was realistic. The visuals weren't so great, being projected a bit far away on the big screen at the front of the room.

It was a great simulation in all aspects, except two: immersion and choice. Notice how I said the visuals are projected on the screen? Yea, one screen for all of us. We watched a film from a driver's seat and were meant to react to it, but there was almost no feedback. The car went forward whether I braked or floored it. The car turned left regardless of where the wheel was. It didn't even matter if the car was 'on'.

Sound familiar? How about your average FPS? As much as WoW is 'on rails', it is a gloriously free and open-ended sandbox compared to your average FPS. Assault this objective! Do not try to climb over the fence. Except that one fence that is scripted to be climbable. You must climb that one. Is this like war? Well sure, there are times when taking any other path will get you filled with bullets, shrapnel, poison, or dirt which is moving at a high speed relative to your body despite being, from most perspectives, stationary. But can you imagine a soldier that he cannot flank the enemy by hopping a fence or crawling around the back way, that he will instead attack a dozen enemies head-on? And of course he never, ever has backup or the option to retreat. That last one is realistic if we're talking about Soviet soldiers in WWII, but outside of that one specific example, which admittedly covers a lot of territory and numbers, there are some options.

The problem is that immersion requires not just appearance, but also choice.

This may mean a loss of historical accuracy while also being more historically realistic. Washington could have done things differently. He had the choice. He happened to take the choices that led to me being here in the best greatest country ever put here by God, in contrast with other countries which were obviously put here by Satan. But he could have ended up as a Loyalist. He had the choice and if we were to play the American Revolution FPS, we'd better get the chance to betray all we stand for in return for evil British gold.

On a side note, FPS aren't quite as much fun before semi-automatic weapons. I played one based on the Civil War once. It was a bit annoying. You'd shoot and then take approximately ten minutes to reload and shoot again, making it slightly more interactive than a vanilla paladin, but that's another story.

There are narrative limits. I cannot imagine the size of the budget required to write, script, and test the endless possibilities for Mr. Pre-President. We'd need sci-fi-style cloning just to get enough writers. So fine, let's force him to be a traitor. But does he have to freeze his ass off in Valley Forge? Can he pay Benedict Arnold so he doesn't pull a Benedict Arnold?

This may be why I enjoy Civilization so much. It isn't historically accurate, and come to think of it, it isn't historically realistic either, but it's something historical. It captures the possibilities. It shows how decisions matter. The butterfly effects of choices are often amazing to see. The potential for greatness, and evil, is nearly limitless. Because of this, despite what the mechanics or graphics might lack, it achieves a level of realistic immersion.

This semi-sandbox sort of play is a source of replay value. The 'story' is different each time. Maybe one game I find myself in a peaceful world where science and cultures are the 'wars'. At another time, I may see perpetual war, shifting alliances, and half a continent burned down (I still maintain that I had no territorial ambitions, which is why I destroyed it all).

Even when there is an overall developer-created narrative path, sandbox elements can help. Take Stalker for example. Ultimately you will do the final thing, whether it is killing the C-Consciousness or dying horribly in Shadow of Chernobyl or leaving the Zone in Call of Pripyat. Yea, a bit of a strange ending: you leave. No great discoveries or victories, merely escape. But along the way there are choices. You can side with various factions. Traveling you can try to protect fellow Stalkers or leave them to their deaths. Or assist them in dying. Maybe you skip half the missions and beeline for the ending cutscene, a choice which sounds remarkably stupid to me, but which sounds quite a bit like the leveling-skippers of WoW. I actually played through CoP a few times, finding more that I had missed and seeing what choices I could make differently.

Admittedly these are essentially cosmetic choices. The economy in the game is easy enough that a vendor benefit isn't needed. A few weapons are different, but nothing is unavailable, just a little harder to get. But it is enough. I can play as I would if I were actually there. Or, as I would if I were actually there but not hiding in a corner weeping, because let's face it, there is no way I'd be going into a dark cave, alone except for the scary mutants lurking all around.

And yet, as much as I might praise choice and various approaches to realism, sometimes it's nice to take the straightforward route and shoot Nazis in the face.

Quote of the Interval of Time

I think that sometimes these books are almost a little too long to the point where the filler distracts us from the story itself. -Syp

This is all too true, not just for LOTRO or WoW, but for about any quest-based game I've ever played. We're supposed to be saving the world and somehow, we still find ourselves interrupted to dig some semi-digested cherries out of deer poop.

This doesn't mean that all side quests are bad. In WoW I would say that from level 1 to around 50 it makes sense. We're not yet heroes, but merely adventurers wandering from one adventure to the next. It isn't until the late game that we are given the "if you don't do this the world ends" goals. I meant that in the pre-Cataclysm context, when level 60 was the time of fighting the Scourge, evil dragons, and evil bugs. After that when we first cross into Outland we've dealt with the previous world-ending evils. Now we're again in search of a purpose. But again, when we get to the higher levels, we have purpose and should no longer be sent off on random tangents. But in LK I don't think this applied. We went north to deal with the Scourge and anything else was a distraction. Except maybe the little tiny matter of an old god. post-80 Cataclysm seemed to be more focused, dealing with the Twilight and Dragons, without constant side-tracking, except maybe in Uldum, which almost felt like the entire place was a side-quest.

Side quests aren't merely a dilution of the main theme. They are a distraction. Even worse,t hey break it up. Imagine trying to watch a great movie, such as any Star Wars that did not include child Anakin, but every five minutes it was interrupted by scenes from Titanic and Battlestar Galactica. Would you find it a big harder to follow the story? And would then Cloud City make very little sense, with suddenly everyone is on a mining outpost with seemingly nothing to do with the main story of becoming a Jedi and hiding after Hoth? Cloud City was a side-quest in a way, branching off the main story, rather than being a completely unrelated interruption. But would we pick that up and be able to tie it in if it was given in the context of everything being a random interruption? Many quests which seem like side-quests, unrelated to the main story, may be entirely relevant, but when we're constantly distracted, we lose track of the connecting threads, and everything falls apart.

Charisma makes sense

Strength is obviously a realistic stat. The amount a person can lift is pretty obviously something that can be expressed with a number. Agility as well, though the dexterity/agility stat looks a bit funny when it starts boosting attack power. I wonder why spirit is so useless, or possibly useful, given that 'spirit rallies' at school always felt pointless. Intellect works somewhat, but it, more than other stats, makes it very clear that the character is separate from the player. Why can't I use my own brain for these spells? And there's the strange part of intellect being a stat used only by casters or possibly some scoundrels in the form of charisma.

Now there's a strange stat, the speech/charisma/persuade stats. I picked the right dialogue choice, so why didnt it work? 22% chance? Ridiculous! Word are words and those were the right ones!

Yes.

Yes? Yes! Yes. Of course. Definitely. I agree. That's correct. I will do that. I accept. These all say the same thing, mostly, but not quite. Say them and change the tone. The words alone do not give the entire meaning. This is where charisma makes sense as a stat.

A simple number may not be the most accurate expression of this stat. But it does get one thing right: the success of words is not merely in the words themselves, but also in how they are delivered. Beside circumstance it is an inner quality which determines the effectiveness of words. That inner ability can change (level up, noob!) but it is not something which can be trumped merely by adding the right lines on top of it.

Now that that is done with, let's ask why our characters never suffer from PTSD. I think a few mental issues could be expected from people who have spent years fighting demons, dragons, and undead.

Alternate Immersion

Does immersion require a rich, detailed story? No! In fact, the opposite may be much better.

Does your average game of capture the flag in Warsong Gulch feel much like a war? Not to me. But why not? Surely we could see how two competing factions might stage some sort of tournaments to keep the other side defeated even if they cannot have open war. Right there, do you see it? I'm having to overthink it. That's bad. The problem is that there is too much lore, too much story. We know too much and from that too much information we can easily determine that Warsong Gulch makes no sense at all.

Team Fortress 2 doesn't mess around with all that nonsense. They just went for the simple point: two mercenary armies of coincidentally equal size, power, and technology, have been hired to do battle on behalf of a pair of greedy brothers. It's set in a silly world which embraces the absurdity of this sort of highly-staged combat.

Embracing the ridiculousness and making that the story gives tremendous wiggle-room when worrying about breaking immersion. Why is there an omniscient announcer at every battle? Why? We don't know! But of course she's there, how could she possibly not be? It just makes sense. Why does it make sense? Because there are no logical or story structures which would contradict the idea of the announcer. So of course she's there. We'd be surprised if she wasn't!

Valve doesn't try to create a deep, story-filled world rich in history to discover. Instead they create a silly world where we feel silly. The silliness is consistent. This works well with their item shop which mostly sells extremely silly-looking hats. While in a fantasy game you may be turned off by money buying a flashing-looking and otherwise inaccessible sword, when everything is silly, someone spending money on a silly hat only adds to the sense of immersion. Immersion in silliness.

This is alternative immersion. This is a different sort of world. A world where flamethrowers are doused with jars of pee, where spies escape notice with a simple paper mask, and where gigantic Russian men fire guns that cost $400,000 to fire for twelve seconds. And it all makes sense, in its own special way.

How to save the Story: Kill ten thousand foozles

Why do we have quests?

Story
Quests tell stories. They can do this well, or poorly. Most do it poorly. So we skip some text and load addons to tell us where to go. Having those, we can skip even more text. Next thing we're missing the truly good stories.

It isn't entirely the fault of the quests. They are little bits of literature, but are not in a literary context. It reminds me of how I have trouble finding the poetry in music because it's not in a poetic context. On the other hand, I'm not much of a fan of poetry anyway, so maybe that's my fault.

Where do I go?
In a game, such as WoW, where level and power are tightly linked, we can't just go wandering off to find something to kill. Well, we can, but trial and error involving lots of death is usually reserved for raiding, rather than getting past level one. Quests are all breadcrumbs and pointers. They say "that over there is something you can be reasonably expected to kill." And so off we go to kill zhevras, wondering where the hooves went.

Before Cataclysm, quests were pretty good at this. Talk to the first exclamation point in the Valley of Honor and keep following those until you're 60, 70, or 80, and you're going to mostly do yellow, maybe some green. It was tuned. Quite an impressive feat, I think.

Cataclysm ruined everything
Cataclysm is my new scapegoat for everything, replacing Lich King, which of course replaced Burning Crusade. Before that I blamed raiders, the Alliance, and EQ.

In cataclysm leveling changed, a lot. It sped up a lot. Too much. This created the problem that quests didn't breadcrumb properly. You might get halfway in and they go all green rather than yellow, like backward bananas, and then where do you go? It also seemed as if the devs really got into the story aspect. Fourth pillar! Screw that, fifth pillar! That's two added pillars to hold up all the story. Or gaming. I'm not really remembering the analogy, but the point is that story became important.

So what?
Wow head suggests something short of ten thousand quests in WoW, 9884 to be exact (what's something short of 120 between friends?), and the first page is dominated by non-quest quests: candy buckets and desecrating fires. Hm. Trying to tell us something?

It's hard to write ten thousand interesting stories. Or five thousand. Or even a few hundred. So we end up with very short bits. Fragments. In theory they can be put together to create an overall narrative or at least a sense of place and history. Or, we skim it for what to kill and move on. Part of this is because we're just trying to level up and part of it is because after five hundred quests that add up to "kill twenty foozles", with barely a story to go with it, who cares anymore?

Embrace your hate
It's time for devs to turn to the dark side. Embrace the foozles. Admit it, quests tell us to kill foozles and that's about it, so don't even bother. In fact, don't waste our time with multiple quests or NPCs. Just give us a wide field of foozles and tell us to kill ten thousand of them. All the grinding with none of the wasted writing talent. There could be a hundreth as many quests

But wait, there's more!
With so many fewer quests, each one becomes individually more important. It's like how diamonds are really just really hard to burn coal, but with enough marketing and artificial rarity, we start to think they're pretty. Pretty ugly, imo. If a game only had a hundred quests, and we knew that three-quarters of those would be "go here" and "kill ten thousand foozles", that only leaves twenty-five queshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifts for real writing. Can a game have twenty five good stories? Or five good stories in five parts each? I think so.

So there it is, separate the grind and the story, purify each, and I think we might even enjoy each one a bit more. After all, I like mindless grinds, and in theory we like good stories, if we had them.

Optimization of Location

A few months back I noted that the teleportation system, along with other mechanics, have made location meaningless in WoW. I ended with this:

Do you care where your character is? Does it make any difference? These days, probably not. Just pick your main city and take the portals where they go.

What I didn't realize is that I'd contradicted myself.

Location still matters. So do talents, stat choices, and enchants. But we don't make many choices anymore.

I mistakenly thought that WoW was losing a sense of location. Quite the opposite. Location had become more important, and optimized. Just as theorycrafters have found the best stats, the best talents, and the best enchants, so have we also found the best location: capitol cities.

Being 'out in the field' just isn't a very good choice anymore and we know this. Unless you're gathering from resource nodes, you're probably wasting time outside the cities. Just as if you're running a PvP spec outside of PvP, you're probably wasting time.

What has happened is that the devs have followed the players. We seek efficiency. This isn't a bad thing. What can be bad is if the devs follow us. We go to a city and they follow us there, placing portals everywhere, teleports, and making outdoor farming obsolete. And so we never leave because we have found efficiency and it has become the only efficiency.

One might hope that hearth location could be a last bit of player choice, but no.

P.S. The dungeon post is coming soon*. It got a bit sidetracked so I spun off Monday's post. Then it got sidetracked again with recent uh... outpourings of elitism over video games.
* For a given definition of soon.

These Pretzels are Making Me Thirsty

Shut up, Tesh. I am perfectly capable of thinking of ideas for posts without you coming in here with ideas to argue against or explore further.

It's a peculiar problem for "live" games that are expected to mutate over time... and player expectation is that it will mutate to their taste.

People like salt. It's a great substance. Makes food taste more. Tasteless soup? Add salt. Tasteless anything? Add salt.

But flavor is something we get used to. Like most things. People who eat spicy food get used to spice. People who eat salty food get used to salt. It ceases to taste salty. Companies did the only sensible thing when competing with salt-addicted customers: they added more. And more. Before long the level of salt in prepared foods was enough to kill a bear at 300 yards, so the FDA tried to step in. But that's beside the point.

Salt is analogous to something in WoW. Maybe it's mount speed, teleportation, or disambiguation of quest objectives. Something that has been desired, and justifiably, since we need salt to live. Gold? Maybe it's experience gain. Blizzard adds salt since that's what we want. Then we get used to it and need more salt. And more. Eventually some high and mighty know it all Pollyanna* who knows better than you comes along to say that this is bad. I guess in this analogy I'm the FDA, except remarkably with even less funding. Hey Congress, a hand here!

In real life I don't eat a lot of salt. My family is in the habit of cooking and we're not major users of the salt shaker for most foods. As a result, we're not desensitized to salt. And so we don't use as much. And so on. Now sugar, I like sugar. Chocolate and... chocolate. Okay maybe I just like chocolate. I'm sure this fits into the analogy somehow. But give me too much salt and I'll feel sick, with too much being a lower amount than for other people.

Have you ever eaten pure salt? It doesn't taste very good. My brother once missed lunch when he was in grade school and somehow got a bunch of salt packets, which he then ate because he was hungry. He got very sick. Pure salt just isn't very good. Added to food it is great. But by itself, not at all.

I think WoW just doesn't have enough food for all the salt it has been putting in it.

* Did you know there are poor children who have never even gotten to play a MMO? They'd love to have the WoW that we keep whining about. But just next door are an elderly couple who may not even own a computer and what do I do to help them with their horrible deprivation? Nothing.

P.S. If the title makes no sense it's because it's from a show about nothing.

My time is most valuable at certain times

Tesh left this comment a few days ago:

The time cost is the whole point. It slows the players down ...sort of like slow travel. Pointless irritation. If I want to explore, I will, and I do, more often than not. If I want to get somewhere *now*, it's pointlessly irritating to make me go through the intervening terrain at a slow clip and/or via a winding path.

Time is what gives a sense of scale. As strange as it sounds, we measure distance by time. To walk a mile is longer than to drive a mile. A mile isn't a mile, a mile is x / v = t. Of course necessary effort, boredom, and incentive matter. We can easily prove this. Run your character from Stormwind to Ironforge by the quickest route that doesn't use the tram or portals. Pretty far, isn't it? Now take the tram. Seems a lot closer. You did actually run a shorter distance, thanks to not going around several mountains, but even if those weren't there, it feels shorter, doesn't it? Now take a portal. Notice how x is unchanged, but v gets faster and faster, reducing t to almost nothing.

Let's move away from that for a moment and think about time the way we normally do, as a blank wall which someone is throwing paint at*. Or as money. Whatever. Something limited.

When is my time most valuable? Trick question, the relevant person isn't me, but those around me. Put me in a group and the time cost is multiplied. I'm not waiting alone, a whole group is waiting. Logically we would want to minimize the time cost when people are in groups compared to when they are alone. In this case we would want to instantly teleport people to groups while using slower mounts and flight paths when they are alone. Finally, since groups often get us killed, make death faster. We already have this with teleports to instances. There are also several group-based forms of rapid transportation: portals, warlock summons, and summoning stones, all of which put people in the same place or bring them together, very quickly.

To take it further, we could identify times when time is particularly valuable, even when not in a group. For example, when doing daily quests we may be sort on time, hence picking short-term tasks which take small amounts of time. Due to the low supply, time is more valuable. Furthermore, any added time from travel is a higher proportion of the total time, further inflated the relative cost of travel time. So we have portals to, or very near, common quest hubs. Finally we may need to log off suddenly or at precise times. In this case, quickly getting to a safe area, preferably one with rested xp, is an urgent matter. And so we have hearthstones.

It appears that WoW has a sensible travel system in regard to minimizing the use of time when it is expensive. This manifests in giving several forms of teleportation when in groups, doing dailies, and logging off. Contrast this with foot or mounted travel when questing, a normally solo and unrushed activity. Logic says that WoW has a good travel system. I don't much like it. So logically, I am illogical.

t = x / v
and
t = x when v = 1
But what is 1?

* back in college I attempted to use this visual to explain my perception of work, chores, and relaxation. The general idea was that a blank wall is nice (day off). A painted wall is nice (work). But a wall with random splatters of paint is not nice (chores/modern art). Everyone thought I was crazy. Not a good way to start my first psychology course.

Pointless Irritation

Melmoth has a point: Item durability is more or less a meaningless irritation at this point in MMOs.

Does armor and weapon durability make you play or think differently? Would you change tactics because of it? Strategy? Class makeup for an instance or raid? Would item durability make you go somewhere that you normally wouldn't? Well obviously this last one is true, you'll hit repair vendors more often, in the city that you're sitting in anyway. So did anything change? Nope.

Durability is a gold sink. That's the given justification. Makes sense. Or does it? I don't think so. If the purpose is merely to regulate the gold supply, why not work off the supply end of it? People might complain if quest gold went down, but would they notice or care about a few copper shaved off mob drops and trash vendor prices?

Repairs could also be WoW's version of a death penalty, a way to discourage dying. Except for that they are too low. And redundant. We already don't want to die. Proof? Battlegrounds. People avoid dying even when armor takes no durability loss (beside the combat damage, but no death damage). People still raid and wipe for hours, going through full durability cycles over a night. It's not the repair cost that makes them play carefully and cautiously, it's the time cost.

Repair costs simply are not adding anything worthwhile. The gold sink could instead be less gold added. They don't discourage death any more than already existing mechanics. They don't send us somewhere new in the world. Instead they send us to the same vendor across the street from the auction house to hand over some more gold. Sometimes they waste our time in a heroic when gear breaks, then we yell at the thoughtless idiot who didn't repair before joining. Repairs don't add any meaning.

This doesn't mean that they couldn't. Repairing armor could be a part of the player economy, using player crafters or even player materials. Is a cobalt bar any different from a few gold? Yes. Yes it is. A cobalt bar sends someone out into the world to find a node. A few gold sends them to the same daily quest they did before. Even worse, when we're saturated with gold and gold sinks, the devs think we're becoming poor, so they add more gold, and then we're inflated so they add sinks, in a round and round cycle of running the same daily so we can pay the same armor vendor from whom we never buy anything.

I suppose this is subjective. Maybe you think that repairs add nothing but irritation, but you also think that running to the black anvil added nothing either. And maybe someone else thinks that repairs make everything so much more real. But I suspect that last person isn't very common.

Acceptable Irritation

Was the Black Anvil a bad idea?

You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?

*sparkles and glitter*
*wooshing noises*
Back in the day...

Once upon a time, Ragnaros had no legs and lived in a place called the Molten Core. As the name implies, it was at the core of something (a mountain) and was molten. However I'm not sure if it would be lava or magma. I suppose it is technically underground, making it magma. Okay the point is, it was a very hot place with a lot of bosses who looked exactly the same but had different numbers of friends (poor Shaz had none) and many of whom did a lot of fire damage. To deal with this we wore gear with the fire resistance stat and told mean jokes about fire mages, who would then cry, which is how they conjured water back then.

Fire resistance gear could be obtained from drops, often in Blackrock Depths, which back then was farmed endlessly in pursuit of fire resistance gear. But there was also gear with higher levels of fire resistance, which was often wanted by tanks, since getting punched in the face by an elemental lord of fire (or maybe he's one notch down the pole) hurts a lot. So they'd craft higher quality FR gear using all sorts of expensive materials.

This special crafting required a special place, the Black Anvil. It's near the start of Blackrock Depths and was the only place where players could create Dark Iron gear (high end FR gear). Imagine needing to run to an instance in the middle of nowhere (or right next door for Alliance) to do your crafting. Sounds crazy doesn't it?

I liked it.

Sure it was inconvenient. But we didn't have to do it all the time, it's not like we were making, let's just say, flasks, and needed to run all the way into the bottom of Scholomance (another story for another day). So when we did go, it made the gear just a little bit more special. It sounds silly, but that's the human mind for you, very silly.

Gear is both reward and tool, but the reward aspect seems diminished these days. None of it is very special anymore. Generic badges gathered from anywhere from the same vendor as everyone else. It almost, almost, makes me miss the days when OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DROP MY DAMN CHEST YOU STUPID JACKASS DRAGON I HAVE BEEN HERE TEN TIMES THIS WEEK! Note: Running UBRS twice in a day was quite a feat, possibly expensive if you needed to hire someone with the key. Different times...

I'm bad at telling stories, give me a better one

I said yesterday that I'd contradict myself and dammit, I intend to do so!

I've been in the starting stages of starting a Star Wars RPG campaign with a couple friends for a few weeks. Originally I was just helping with physics homework but you know how nerds are, with one thing leading to another. Early on in this long starting planning phase I ran into a major problem: I'm really bad at creating backstories. Why am I working with another thief to steal from the Empire? Alas, they did not accept my reasoning that I was a pyro who figured he'd steal before burning. Also thrown out was the idea of stealing for shits and giggles and figuring the Empire had some really cool giggles. We've still not quite resolved why my 16 year old character is hanging out with a 30-something year old woman, but hey, who didn't think about that at that age? Which if you're thinking what I'm thinking, that's been just short of explicitly given the no.

Previously I've complained about content being split into a "fun" and "trivial" (exaggerated word choice) track, especially when said content isn't even all that different. It was in the context of ICC hardmodes and how they are the same boss, 90% the same fight, in the same place, but a lot more fun. It seems that good-evil splits in games often follow this route. You fight more or less the same enemies in the same places, just you say meaner things while you do it. Along the way your alignment may cause unexpected problems, such as recently in Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl where my little tiny shooting someone in the face incident got taken all out of proportion and one of the major faction who show up half of everywhere decide to shoot at me on sight, even if they've never seen me before.

The overall plot is often unchanged, just with the slight twist of "you're the bad guy now, kath hound!"

Does this add any replay value? Maybe. A little bit. I mean, you probably want to play through a second time to see what happens if you backstab everyone you meet, but it's not really a fun or content doubler.

How about rather than pretending to give me a choice, you just give me a good story to play through? Just one. Maybe I'm a good guy, maybe I'm a bad guy, maybe I'm something in the middle. But give me a story to follow, not one to intermittently influence in barely more than cosmetic ways. It feels bad to finish a story a certain way only to later learn from fifteen consecutive hours on tvtropes or wikipedia that my ending wasn't canon and in fact I saved the kitten farm rather than calling in an orbital bombardment. If I can't really be evil, don't give the illusion! It's cruel.

But just to double up the self-contradiction, maybe choice really is ideal and the true problem is that we don't have enough. Maybe the ideal is to give other characters stories to act out while I am the free agent between them all. Maybe I should be able to just fucking stab Kreia with a lightsaber after her first obnoxious lecture about morality when she's planning to ruin everything, which if you're familiar with her plot, wouldn't the destruction hurt everyone, possibly even killing everyone? As much as people say they'd rather die free than live a slave, the particular slavery wasn't all that bad compared to whatever sort of horrible death would result from the 'liberation'.