Busy SWTOR weekend

It was only a long trek to 50 because I made it that way, but finally the Dark Schneider made it to 50 last night. Although I am not sure I will keep playing him a lot at 50 – wanted to try out Scoundrel healing but the server population made it impossible to try – it was definitely worthwhile to play through the end of the stories on Corellia and the smuggler’s class story. Props to the Wookiee Bowdaar for sticking it out with me, responding quite affectionately to…most of my choices! After a long history of being the good guy, making the light choices, and sparing folks, working with shady types, and getting betrayed repeatedly for it…Daku went on a dark-tinged killing spree on Corellia. Darmas Pollaran, who made the Republic privateer job sound so good before he twisted it all to serve the Empire? Contemptuously asking for a price to spare him? Blam! Senator Dodonna, who recruited you for the privateer job before throwing in with the Empire? Ends up a kitchen slave? Even plays the True Love card? Blam! And the Voidwolf, the beneficiary of all that betrayal…well, let’s say his plan to unite the underworld to work for the Empire backfired, along with the grenade that he should have had on a shorter fuse. Oops.

So that’s the wrap-up on 50 levels of scheming, plotting, finagling and flirting. The smuggler becomes the hero of the Republic for freeing Corellia, and ruining the Voidwolf’s plot, and getting the other smuggler types to work for the Republic…at least, for a while. A nice final touch was hearing from the entire crew, most of which I sadly hadn’t seen much of since I started working with Bowdaar, my kick-ass melee partner. And after a little chat, the crew heads back to the ship for more adventure…and there is more. How much more I don’t know yet. Clearly not enough for some, but plenty for me, so far.

Besides, still haven’t finished courting Risha, and that simply will not do.

Fight!

Just passing along some really nice music from the Gundam Unicorn OST volume 2, that I used yesterday as inspiration for an RPG fight scene. The last minute in particular is wonderfully intense. Maybe I’ll loop it this evening as I go into SWTOR and try to get my smuggler at long last to level 50. One more level to go.

Cats, always loafing

…even in middle-earth, it seems. Since SWTOR will be in the stores tomorrow I expect to be installing it and witnessing long queues and server crashes. Tonight I was taking care of my affairs in LOTRO and having a look in the Lone-Lands. My remaining deed points in Bree-land are ridiculous, so they can wait (killing hundreds of barrow-wights and spiders). Came back to Bree to crash in the Prancing Pony, and I spotted this cat doing what cats do. Even the pixelated breed.

Musical interlude

After finally laying WoW to rest, I’ve been goofing off playing LOTRO – just a stopover, a fill-in until SWTOR hits the stores next week. Could have preordered, I suppose, but I’m in no particular hurry. Being on a raiding schedule is not something I miss.

Yesterday was interesting, though, and not just for the frivolous Deeds I was working on to accumulate Turbine points rather than buy them. My elf hunter is ready to move on from Bree-land, but I have lingered there awhile to finish some content that’s worth points. But working out of Bree allowed me to see a little in-game concert being held outside the Prancing Pony.

I already knew that there was a system for generating music in-game, and how files could be written up, stored, and then called from within the game. But I hadn’t seen it in use extensively before, much less by a group. Not sure how they handle timing it so they all begin at once, but it was nice to watch groups of 2, or 4, or 6 get together and play.

I stuck around for about an hour and they were still going in ‘open mic’ mode, with individuals and pairs stepping up in turn to play a tune. Xmas music, LOTR music from the movies, the Star Wars theme, current RL music…well, someone had to translate it into LOTRO’s version of the ABC notation.

Of course, the song that got the most cheers was Tom Bombadil’s theme. The most popular character that somehow got cut from the movies, sheesh. Got time enough for five different endings but not this fellow, what gives?

Having played through almost all of the Bree content, and certainly all of the Shire stuff and the epic book quests that involve him, I can see why. Tom’s this one bright, happy spot in the middle of a forest full of nasties, next door to the Barrow-downs full of wights. Bree is not the most pleasant area. Quite a contrast from running mail and spoiled pies around the Shire. There’s actual orcs and such.

I suppose the game will get somewhat more grim, should I venture onward at some point. Nice to see the community there, however small it may be, thriving in its own way. It’s a good thing that the game went F2P.  It shouldn’t go under the way some other MMOs had to, for lack of subscriptions.

Calling it a day

The Old Republic beta testing is finally over, leaving me with a couple of weeks to find something else to do. This evening I took care of some business that turned out to be a lot sadder than I’d expected.

Tindalos has found his spot to settle down.

With access to the new replica gear vendors and the transmog reskinning of armor pieces, I picked up his DK starter blues from back when he was just taking off for Outland and transmogrified his mix of Cataclysm gear to resemble the best gear set death knights ever had. Better even than the junior-Lich King model from Icecrown Citadel. Would have liked to leave him with Shadowmourne, but I figured out a long while ago that it just wasn’t in the cards.

I have parked him in Grizzly Hills, down the hill from Conquest Hold, where he can relax with the Horde left behind in Northrend and fish for Glacial Salmon. I liked death knights enough, I guess, that the game felt…done after the end of WotLK, slaying Arthas and finishing what the death knights set out to do.

While I took my last cruise around the zone looking for a spot, it figures that my favorite piece of music would cue up (the first song from the Night Music set). Good sendoff from the game. I have some pre-paid subscription time left until January, but little reason to play again. Maybe in the future I’ll be back at it, playing pandaren monks or the next big thing after that, but for now, all done…and that will probably close the book on WoW posts here as well. Seven years playing WoW, a good run.

I played a lot of toons in WoW before settling on my DK (and his/her many races, genders and faction switches) as the character and story I liked most. I wonder who my next avatar will be in a galaxy far, far away?

Old Republic beta adventures

Now that the non-disclosure restriction has been lifted, I can finally write a bit about my adventures in beta testing. Although this has been off for a little while now, being sick and busy at work have made things difficult. Anyway, on with the show.

This is one of the many little treats you can run into in TOR. Doesn’t look like chess — pazaak I think. But the lesson is the same. Let the Wookie win. He shrugs and hoots and hollers and gets up and stomps around and pumps his fists, while the hapless dis-armed droid just sits there. I spotted this yesterday while re-playing the intro zone with the Imperial Agent class; that’s my Chiss agent gawking at the spectacle.

And yes, way off on the other side you can see the Twi’lek dancer on a stripper pole…doesn’t matter if they’re clothed or not, the female Twi’leks dance like night elves. Doesn’t even require a mailbox. It does help to be in a cantina in Hutt space, though. This screenshot was from the main Hutta world; later on Nar Shadaa is an adventuring option.

I’ve tried out a variety of classes in SWTOR, and dabbled with all of them. But the one I leveled the most was the Republic’s Trooper. Here is my trooper flying a whale on Alderaan. It was interesting to get to Alderaan, while completing the first big chapter in the trooper’s story. Her squad on Ord Mantell defected to the Empire by the time she reached the end of the quest line there. The first chapter, crossing many levels and several worlds, chronicled her efforts to bring them all to justice.

I found myself a bit sad adventuring on Alderaan. Knowing the end of its story was destruction and all. But it was neat to see it, not just intact, but before it became such a staunch defender of the Republic. At this point in time it has seceded and is up for grabs, and on Alderaan I got to work for the Organa family/house. Contributing to a piece of Star Wars history; nice touch.

Also, nice to have such interesting stories to pursue with the shooter classes. After the experience with Star Wars Galaxies, I went in expecting the non-lightsaber classes to be lackluster and unenjoyable compared to the shining stars of Jedi and Sith characters. Hardly! I have no doubt that I will be playing an Imperial Agent/Operative when the game finally arrives around xmas, and I’m not sure what I will choose on the Republic side, but the Trooper/Commando has been a lot of fun. I’m not sure which I like more, crushing my enemies with gravity effects or setting them on fire with plasma.

Also, I found on this last go-round that the variety of races available is class-based. The test server I was on this last beta build has gotten stuffed with new players this weekend, so I’m wandering. I had thought there was just one simple set of four races, but it’s a set of four for each class, and they vary. It appears the Chiss Bounty Hunter is still an option (awesome). And the Miraluka was an option for the last Jedi Consular that I tried.

Still no playable Trandoshans that I can see, though.

Also on Alderaan…look out, it’s a Stray Nerf! Run for your lives!

Seriously, I could not help but laugh when I found the origin of the ‘scruffy nerf-herder’ line. Never mind that similar cow-ish beasts populate other worlds. This is the vaunted Nerf. Sadly, no one was herding it.

Well, enough for now. I expect maybe another WoW post or two, but it’s going to fade to black for me as I move on to SWTOR — at least for awhile. Maybe time to give the Smuggler a decent try and see if I like that more than the Jedi Consular, which has been interesting in either advanced version.

Pricing Playstations and the Old Republic

After playing WoW for this long, these phenomena seem like bad omens for Azeroth and me. I had to look back at my last WoW-related post to see that it had already been about a month at the beginning of July, since I bailed on raiding and actively playing the game. Since then, Sue has done a little raiding, we’ve played our troll alts with the Wreck List and raided a few old dungeons for fun, and I’ve wasted some time trying out different rep grinds.

So now we have SWTOR on pre-order, and I’m looking to get a new gaming console. Kinda sad! But what else is there, when the game just isn’t doing it anymore. I can’t find the motivation to raid with our present set of misanthropes, nor do I feel like leaving them and finding some new crew, getting back on a schedule. I don’t miss having to be online at all. I have a few more things I’d like to do, and maybe some of them I still won’t get to do, like finishing the Shadowmourne quest line. I may look into how difficult ICC 25 pugs are to organize and run these days, and perhaps run a few to get the rest of my shards.

Unless something changes, though, one day soon I will park my death knight somewhere in Grizzly Hills, maybe with the legendary axe or maybe just with a fishing pole by a salmon pool, and that’ll be it. Not going to give away my stuff or delete my toons; one never knows, could go back to it one day. And I’m not going to feel bad about playing the game for years. I’ve played it until it wasn’t fun anymore.

Sort of WoW-related

I’ll leave this in the WoW category as it’s sort of a comparison: I spent some time this weekend playing LOTRO to try it out.

I took the basic download — there was a higher graphics quality download that was huge comparatively, dodged that like 7-hour DL time — good choice apparently. The graphics seemed nice enough in the version I was playing. There was a problem with DirectX 10, however. I could not get the game to run well and consistently with that. Had to tune it down to DirectX 9, even though the game insisted that 10 was optimal and that my machine could handle it. Clearly something was not optimal. During this process, I was most confused by the insistence upon a product key which, as it turned out, I didn’t need. I have no idea why the registration makes so much noise about it. Maybe for the premium signups.

Since I got my PC specifically to handle WotLK and its expected higher graphics requirements (and they were), a bit of mild disappointment here over the DirectX thing and black screens and repeated reboots trying to sort it out. I expected my machine to run this sucker right out of the box, no worries. The other issue I ran into was lag, although I suspect the newbie zones were swamped this weekend with nerds like me. I wouldn’t necessarily hold that against the game. But I did get frozen indefinitely for awhile, and gave up and went back to WoW for an afternoon. Not working as intended, heh.

The good points I saw were the intro zone’s meaningful questline and advancement. You’re not beating up baby wolves and ineffectual kobolds with candles on their heads and being molested by hordes of murlocs…well, not just that, anyway. Getting sucked into something with story from the get-go is a nice difference. The phasing (dynamic layers, they called it) is obviously another item Blizzard saw and thought ‘cool, I’ll steal that idea’. Story-laden advancement is obviously something being built into Cataclysm, as notes from the beta show.

Advancement is notably slow. But then, with more story, it seems ok. Besides, the level cap isn’t so high as in WoW. The pressure to level cap and go raid, well. I don’t have it for LOTRO. I don’t know that I ever will.

I have heard that the graphics quality is supposed to be an eye-grabber. I thought the toons’ faces in character generation looked a little…dopey, inexpressive. Glad I didn’t have to look at them much. But I didn’t detect much zombie factor. The uncanny valley, I’ve seen it called. Close enough to make the differences creepy. I distinctly recall that in SWG; not so much here. I understand some players think WoW should look something more like LOTRO. More realistic. But WoW is simply following its RTS ancestors, and in being more cartoony, it’s excusable. Not creepy. Maybe a bit silly.

As for the available free options vs. what you can buy, sheesh. Just tons of things you can buy. Two classes I’d have to buy — the rune-keeper in particular I’d like to play. I struggle and fail to find something new or innovative in the character classes. You’ve got buffing-fighter, dps’ing-fighter, tanking-fighter. All as different classes. Ugh. Hunter, rogue, mage with pets (this I gave a real try), a minstrel that attacks and heals with snippets of song. I tested out a minstrel briefly just to see it in action. Hack, stab, play a little tune! Hack, stab…well, it’s odd. They all seem capable enough of getting by solo. But I didn’t advance enough to see any…means of differentiation. No talent type system that I could see. Perhaps crafting? I don’t know. Maybe all the high-end characters look alike, act alike.

Anyway, I have a lore-master on the Brandywine server and we’ll see if Joel and I track each other down somewhere, since it was his idea that I check it out. I only got to about level 11, so if he’s elsewhere maybe I will start anew on his server. I could use the alts to generate Turbine Points. Not sure how much I would pay for this game, this content. But it’s an interesting distraction from the WoW norm.

Evolution as a game

Another episode of It Came From Pharyngula. There is a lively discussion taking place there about a little grade-school level biology game called CellCraft, which I will not bother linking (you can find it yourself) due to its ties to intelligent design proponents.

Since ID has already been thoroughly linked to creationism and demonstrated to be creationism in disguise in court, I have no problem dismissing their products as propaganda and lies. Apparently in this case, some game designers simply got taken in. At this point one can see why creationists pursue degrees in science that they don’t personally believe in. The titles are useful.

I went over and played the game some myself, though, and it seemed an interesting way to learn about cell structures and some of the things they do. Unfortunately, reality — unguided biology and chemistry — isn’t much of a game, so the designers (ha) made it an explicitly guided process, to the point of scientists dropping ready-made organelles into their cell ‘character,’ and so the link between the game design and the ID advisors is pretty clear. Apparently the platypus characters in the game may also be a nod to ID tropes.

Reading the comments, I can see that they arrived at the same problem I had: evolution doesn’t make for much of a good game. So in a way, even without the ID adherents suckering the game designers into designing creationist propaganda for childhood indoctrination — remind you of anything else? — the gamers couldn’t win. The question was brought up and PZ decided to shut it down.

Don’t fall for this trick. Now they’re demanding that we say how to make a good evolution game. Here, in the comments of a web site that isn’t much about gaming. That’s just dishonest.

Game design is hard. When you browse through that CellCraft forum, you can see that they were working on figuring out how to make it playable for a long time — you aren’t going to fart out solutions here in a day or two.

At the same time that I agree with PZ, that it’s disingenuous to ask a scientist how to make a good game of science, maybe someone there who plays games or even designs games or did in the past might have some insight.

My own comes from a dubious source, just call it a dream. But I couldn’t help thinking of the game that once came together in my thoughts as I read about this CellCraft business. The one I thought of was a social game like an MMO, an accelerated game of evolution, accelerated to the point that individuals evolved during their lifetimes — ridiculous by the standards of reality, but it was just a game. Likewise ridiculous that single celled animals would be intelligent enough to speak with each other, but otherwise it’d be a pretty quiet social game world.

It was a process many RPG gamers would recognize. In some of these games, your interests make your character change and grow, determine your ‘character class,’ your skills, even guide the course of the game. There were cells that loved to race around the environment, cells that got tough and strong to move things around, cells that explored the environment and learned that it wouldn’t last forever. Evolve a way to fix it, or survive it, or escape it.

Well, at some point I woke up and most of the details were lost, like with all dreams. And I know that, if PZ were to check this out, he’d probably scoff and say that’s not evolution. But anything you can play — guide or influence in some way — is by definition not evolution, which is not a process guided by intelligence. You can’t play evolution. But can we play something like it, and at what point do the changes make it a poor learning tool?

I can agree, having glorified creationists building ‘science’ games is a farce. As for the rest, well, I wonder. I never seem to have any good answers, do I. Just questions. Skepticism is like that.