Yes, I finally saw the “Bourne Ultimatum.” And I loved it. There’s something about the Bourne movies that you just don’t get in other action films. I think it’s the fact that while the characters exist at the extremes of what human beings are capable of, they’re not supermen and superwomen. No wire work, no CGI amping up the fight scenes—just human brutality overlaid with either that signature heart-pounding piece of music or even no music at all. Don’t get me wrong; there’s a warm spot in my heart for Matrix-y bullet-time and the wire work of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” But sometimes, particularly for the spy genre, it’s really heart-stopping to see something that can feel so real. I remember my reaction when the first Bourne movie was announced. It can be summed up as, “Matt Damon, action hero?! No WAY.” And yet he works perfectly as the series’ protagonist. I never would have expected it, and yet now I can’t imagine anyone else in the role.

We also saw “The Invasion,” with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. It felt like they left a few scenes on the cutting room floor; the pace and story were a bit jumpy in a few places. Other than that, however, I definitely enjoyed it.

If you’re in a bookish mood, I highly recommend checking out the R.I.P. II challenge. I think I’m a little too buried in books right now to go after it myself, but it looks like a great one!

Edit: Just had to add my favorite patch note from the new LotRO patch:

People were really bummed in Rivendell, sometimes. Now they shouldn’t be so depressing, even the Bowyer who was always going on with ‘Oh, woe is me!’ and ‘It’s terrible, just terrible!’ — brought to you by the ‘Rivendell Is A Happy Place!(tm)’ tourism bureau.

And, my second-favorite:

No more deja vu! You should now only see Athal once. You should now only see Athal once. (ed. note. MadeOfLions, that was too easy! You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed. -Patience)

I love that Turbine adds some amusement to keep the patch notes from being impossibly dry and boring.

Since I’ve been chatting about Pirates of the Burning Sea on other folks’ blogs for a while now (hi, Bildo and Keen & Graev! *waves*), I figured it was time to muse on the subject myself. But first, as context, a couple of thoughts on where my current MMORPG gaming lies:

City of Heroes/City of Villains: Currently I’m playing these two the most, although that’s mostly because they’re my most recent purchase and I’m rather expecting to end my subscription when I next decide to subscribe to another game, so I want to get my play-time in now. Love the highly individualized characters; love the faithful genre-feel; miss the ability to juggle 20-40 quests at a time.

LotRO: My current favorite of the games I play. I love to relax with this game, and can enjoy just about anything with it, from questing to deeds to crafting (yes, I even have a grand master cook). Love the deed system in particular, and the crafting is more complex and useful, IMO, than Warcraft’s. Of course I gather soloing gets rather tough at high levels, and it has the usual end-game “what now?” woes.

World of Warcraft: Warcraft is rather like an old friend who grows in a different direction than you do. You think of it fondly, you still hang out with it once in a while, but mostly you realize that you have very little in common with it any more—and that’s okay. Things change and eventually you just have to move on. Because of the way it’s designed, it really isn’t viable for them to push casual (i.e., non-raider, non-PvP) content much beyond the run it’s already had and keep it interesting and worth the expansion pack price of admission, IMO. But again, that’s okay. I had my more-than-two-years of fun with it, and I’m happy with that. I’m still subscribed for now, and I’ll continue to play now and then as long as it continues to be a way to hang out with distant friends, but eventually I expect to move on entirely.

This did, however, leave me wondering what would take its place, and then along came Pirates of the Burning Sea. Bildo in particular has been talking up how wonderful it is, and eventually I just had to overcome my inertia and go check it out.

What I saw didn’t just intrigue me; it made me immediately fill out a beta app and start babbling about game design details to my husband. I swear I check my inbox once an hour in the hope of getting a beta invite.

Sure, there’s a ton of very different stuff in the game, and that’s what intrigues me about it—it’s high time someone made a game that broke the mold, and this one looks like it’s broken almost all of them! The thing I truly can’t wait to play with, though? The entirely player-run economy. *rubs hands together with glee* Plots of land! Manufacturing! Resources! Trading! I swear, that could be the entire focus of the game and I’d be in heaven.

Okay, so there are ways this game could play out that might cause me to say, “well, it’s got awesome ideas, but it just isn’t for me.” However, I’m sure as hell going to give it the chance to impress me, because those ideas really are awesome.

Now… anyone got an inside track on a spare beta invite? Or maybe a Limited Wish spell lying around?

I’m not lazy
I’m just out of MANA

One of my more recent blog finds has been Melmoth’s Inferno. I can’t resist it, thanks to such engrossing posts as An undead berry is a Lichee? (which suddenly reminds me that I have a delectable can of lichee nuts in my kitchen, hmm… You know, they actually do kind of look like undead berries):

Considering the sheer variety and culinary diversity that exists in MMOs these days and seeing as adventuring folk spend so much of their time masticating, why not making eating into a mini-game? Yeah, you could make it such that combining foods into ‘courses’ will enable bigger and better buffs as well as healing and replenishing mana. If you have a small soup starter and manage to follow it up with the lamb shanks and roasted vegetables, you’re allowed to try for the power combo finishing desert item! But only if you ate all of your brussels sprouts and you used the correct spoon for the soup. Otherwise the buff fails, and you go straight to bed without getting to fight Bregnip the Merciless.

Does it make me a bad person that I think this actually sounds hysterically fun? But then I’m one of those loons who totally enjoys the farming and cooking crafts in LotRO.

Anyhow, eating a pork pie and suddenly being able to bench press an elephant, or eating cheese and suddenly being more intelligent but only for thirty minutes! is totally bizarre. And what if you melt cheese on a pork pie and eat that, does that count? What happens then? Are you suddenly able to bench press an elephant with your brain? Can your pectoral muscles calculate pi to four hundred places? Food would become dangerous, you wouldn’t know whether to put mustard on your pie in case it combined in some weird way that gave your nipples the power to whistle dixie every time you’re struck in combat. For thirty minutes only.

Go on, read the whole post. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. Make sure to always read the comments on his posts as well, because they’re frequently just as hilarious. Next in my list of new favorite reads is his entry, You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, which brings us the adventures (such as they are) of Timothy and Trevor, two troll guards sent to find out What’s Going On around the troll encampment:

Timothy: “You’re a peon at work. Good. Good. And you’re another peon, well done. Ok”

Trevor: “You’re a guard, that’s fine. And here’s a priest, lovely. Lovely.”

Timothy: “And here we have the corpse of Tony, who appears to have been smashed to a pulp with a large blunt instrument of war. Ok, good, good.”

Trevor: “Well I think that’s everything, shall we head back to base, Tim?”

Mark my words, someday this blogger will be getting his books published, if he isn’t already. If the rest of us are lucky, that is.

Lawful Stupid

This is only my third MMORPG, but it’s the first time I’ve been able to so thoroughly customize a character. I’d gotten the impression from some of the blog posts I’d seen that the customization was largely just of costume, so I was amazed to see how much you could also affect personal appearance, including many aspects of body type and height, skin color, hair style, a wide variety of facial expressions and facial types, and so on. It completely and utterly seduces the character-creator in me, and I find that the various characters I make look nothing like each other. I also find it far easier to recognize and immediately separate out the various other player characters around me in game. (I couldn’t help going so far as to make a writers’ exercise out of the whole process.)

Needless to say, I’m head-over-heels for the character creation process. I did find that things got a little more confusing after getting into game, however. The tutorial is of limited use for some of the basic types of characters and learning the most basic functionality of the game, but there’s no specific material for teaching you to use the more complex character types—you’re simply told to take a break and go read the manual. Also, if you buy the “Good vs. Evil” version (i.e., the bundled CoH/CoV), which comes with the “VIP club” pass allowing you to teleport into the “Club D” pocket dimension from anywhere in game, I highly recommend waiting to use it until you’re high enough level to survive those areas that have doorways into Club D already. I couldn’t find a way out of the club that didn’t involve going through those zones, and unlike some other games you can’t just necessarily corpse run your way home—getting killed often sends you back to a distant hospital.

Mobs of various levels tend to be scattered around and intermixed a bit more than I’m accustomed to from other games, so it’s easy to round a corner and quickly realize that you’d better turn around and run back the other way. Mind you this seems rather genre-appropriate, so that’s okay. I have yet to figure out how to tell how level-appropriate a mission I’ve been given is until I enter it and view the mob levels; I wish that wasn’t the case. Also, as far as I can tell you can only be on one mission at a time, so if you find it’s a bit much for you, your only options seem to be to either group with others or go beat up random mobs until you level up a bit. In general I prefer to be able to pick up a variety of quests at once and work on whatever seems convenient. Of course, offsetting that is the fact that when you’re playing with superpowered heroes and villains combat can be much more entertaining and fun than in some games, so pure beating up of mobs does have its appeal!

I absolutely adore the three-dimensional aspect of the game. In most games there are very limited ways to, for example, get to any upper levels that might exist in a city and explore them. In CoH/CoV you can use flying abilities and items such as jump packs to boost you up to virtually anywhere—and you’ll find mobs up there when you arrive! You can run and jump over exactly the kind of rooftop terrain you might find in your favorite genre movie, which is just fantastic.

The creators seem to have taken the convenient genre excuse to do away with one of the traditional MMORPG nuisances—travel time. Every character can use a sprint ability to move quickly through the city, and you can buy enhancements to that run speed if you wish. Subway trains link the zones, and travel via them is virtually instantaneous. When done with a mission, a single button can return you to outside the instanced mission area, so you don’t have to run through all that space you just cleared.

All in all, it’s a truly fun game. I’ve only run into a few difficulties with things that were a little confusing, or odd little bugs that I haven’t found my way around yet. (I can’t seem to use the /tell or /t command to talk to anyone… no matter how many variations on the supposed syntax I try it tells me I have the wrong format. But I can at least /reply, so I don’t have to be entirely rude!) I think my husband was quite amused by my evil cackles last night as I ran around playing a petite, young-looking girl less than four feet tall with stony skin who hits like a ton of bricks, complete with massive-punch-landing sound effects.

How could I resist?!

In unrelated news, the Deep Fathom Review is up. Deep Fathom wasn’t as good as Rollins’s Black Order, and definitely was more of a sort of light beach read than Black Order was, but it was still enjoyable!

This is my ALT

I haven’t posted about LotRO for a while, so it’s time for another round-up of thoughts on that game. On the one hand, I don’t tend to play the game for hours on end the way I used to with Warcraft. On the other hand, I think that’s mostly because I have other things to do these days. I’m almost always working on things that are in some way related to the website and my reviewing.

I find LotRO to be a more relaxed experience than Warcraft. There are more frequent towns and stablemasters, so it’s easier to just play for a little while and have some fun without needing to invest a huge amount of effort at once. Every time I think of playing Warcraft again I think of how much effort it would take just to get to the area of my next quest and try to finish it that I end up not bothering; now that I’m happy to be spending the majority of my time on other things, I’d much rather play a more relaxed game where I can easily log in, wrap up a few quests, and log off again.

It isn’t that the quests are somehow fundamentally easier, but that there are more of them. If you want to advance in Warcraft—particularly if you tend to solo—you need to do pretty much all of the quests, and that means often traveling well out of your way to get the next stage accomplished before you can move on. With LotRO, I find I can always find a deed to work on or a quest to accomplish that suits my level and won’t take a serious investment of time and effort, if that’s what I’m looking for. There’s a ton of fellowship quests available if you want a greater challenge, but LotRO makes it much easier than Warcraft to subsist on other quests should you so desire simply because there are so many. Occasionally you need to do some traveling, sure, but you don’t have nearly the preponderance of “FedEx” quests as Warcraft, and most of them are meant to introduce you to a new area and can be batched.

This isn’t the only reason I prefer LotRO to Warcraft right now (the crafting system is another reason, but I’ll talk more about that once I’ve explored the further reaches of it some more), but it’s definitely a big one.

I do have to say that I was wrong when I initially said that the game seemed less immersive, and the characters more androgynous and obviously computer-generated. I think it was just that I was used to WoW’s cartoonish style. Now that I’ve gotten used to LotRO’s style I actually quite like it, and find the more “realistic” swaths of grass and such to be more immersive than Warcraft’s style.

This is my ALT

I’ve been off reading Chessack’s great game design rants on Enigmatic Diversions lately. I ended up mailing one of them, Fun and Anger are Incompatible, off to my husband because I thought it was so well-done. Some of the points he makes in his articles remind me of one of my old writing-related hobby-horses from years ago: readability. It goes something like this:

If you are writing for publication, and thus an audience, the major concern you should have is whether your work is readable. What do I mean? Well, take your average writing class for a moment. Say one of your fellow classmates brings a memoir piece to class, and one of the criticisms leveled at it is that some of the details just aren’t believable. The author immediately pipes up with, “but that’s the way it really happened!”

Does that matter? Not really. After all, if the work got published it would be read by plenty of people who, when they decided something was unbelievable, wouldn’t have the author there to tell them “that’s the way it really happened.” This means that the piece must be altered such that it’s believable. This is why there’s a difference between memoir and autobiography—memoir is meant to be read more for entertainment’s sake, and thus it’s expected that authors will fudge details, such as combining several “real” characters into one semi-fictional one for readability’s sake.

Imagine that another classmate brings in a fantasy story filled with dragons, epic heroes and sword-fights. The problem is, he’s detailed the sword-fights blow-by-blow and they’re boring as all hell. His response? It’s a story set in his favorite roleplaying game universe, and that’s how the system works. Well, that doesn’t matter either if he wants the story to appeal to anyone other than himself and a few friends. He’s better off trying to retain the feel of the universe—and, sure, stay within the nuts and bolts of the mechanics—but gloss over those things that aren’t as entertaining in print as they are around a gaming table.

Of course it’s still possible for something that isn’t 100% “readable” by this definition to be an enjoyable read, because it’s a continuum. If the rest of the piece is good enough then some or even most of your readers might ignore the not-so-good parts. Still, by improving on those parts you can improve your craft and the size of your audience, and I can’t think of a down-side to that. You just have to be willing to set aside the defensive part of you that wants to think your writing is great as it is.

Ultimately this is an audience concern. If you’re writing a poem just for your own enjoyment, then you only have to worry about whether it’s good enough to make you happy. But if you’re writing something for others to read then you need to take them into account.

This relates perfectly to tabletop roleplaying; the only difference is that the game master’s (GM’s) “audience” consists of his players while a company publishing RPG material obviously has a much wider public audience. The GM must tailor things to his players’ tastes and desires, and a company must make things usable by a variety of players. Games must be playable.

One of my favorite examples of a module that looked impressive but lacked playability was Troll Lord Games’s The Malady of Kings. The concepts were lovely and the storyline quite magical, but the player characters (PCs) essentially ended up being passive observers who were handed from major character to major character. The adventure included a number of invisible choices where if the PCs happened to do the wrong thing they were totally screwed. The author forgot to take the free will and enjoyment of his wider audience into account. He forgot to consider that other GMs’ players might not make the choices or play the types of characters he assumed. He didn’t remember that he was writing for a particular audience, and in so doing, he drastically undercut his adventure’s playability.

Finally, this also applies to MMORPGs, as Chessack so eloquently argues. As long as a company is designing a game for the enjoyment of a paying audience, they have to try to please that audience. Note that this does not mean pleasing each individual member of that audience, since often individuals want things that won’t make the larger whole happy. However, to quote Chessack,

Because people play games to have fun, it is necessary to design games to be fun. And therefore, designers must absolutely make certain that they do not implement anything in a game that is not fun. If something accidentally makes it into the game that isn’t fun, it must be excised as soon as it is discovered. Most particularly, here, I refer to game elements that are the antithesis of fun. In general, again unless you are some sort of an abnormal person, you won’t be having fun if you are angry, or annoyed. Annoyance is not fun for anyone (sane). When you are angry, you are not having fun — you are pissed off, furious, aggravated, not enjoying yourself. No game that is well designed ought to incorporate anything into itself that is designed to make you angry. That would be poor game design.

Lest someone take this too directly and literally (because someone always does), let me say now that this does not mean that each and every thing in a game has to right that second make everyone happy. Sometimes a frustrating obstacle or two makes victory all the sweeter, and something that frustrates one person might make another happy. Again, it’s the larger audience that the designers must concern themselves with, not individuals.

Therefore, when something irritates the larger portion of your audience, you need to choke down the defensive reaction and change it. When something irritates a smaller portion of your audience, you need to see if there’s an alternate design choice you can make that makes that portion of your audience happy without losing those folks who like the original design decision or derive some benefit from it. Often there are multiple possible ways to accomplish a design goal, and sometimes it takes trial and error, tweaking, or an out-and-out overhaul to do something in a way that makes as many people as possible have fun. You don’t have to make every element of your game appeal to everyone—in fact, you can’t—but you do have to make as many elements as possible appeal to as many players as possible.

People want to enjoy themselves not just when playing an MMORPG, but also when playing a tabletop game or reading a book. They aren’t enjoying themselves if they’re frustrated, bored, and so on. Your ultimate goal when writing a book, a game, or anything else is readability and/or playability, which ultimately means keeping your audience in mind at every step of the way. Not just your ideal reader or player, but the rest of your audience as well.

Elite Mom! Shirts, mugs, buttons, more

Foton has posted quotes from a great list of Phrases you will never see on the WoW Forums. This originated from a thread on the Warcraft forums themselves, but AFKG is the better bet for being able to find the best ones archived long-term.

My humble submissions:

• “Pallys and Shamen are the best-balanced classes in the game.”
• “Go ahead and take your time rolling out those features, Blizz; it’s more important to get it right than do it fast.”
• “I’d really love to see this feature added, but it isn’t urgent; take care of some other folks’ needs first.”
• “I’m not happy about these changes, but let’s face it, I love Warcraft and it isn’t like they’ll make me quit or anything.”
• “I’d really like to see these changes made, but I know I’m not typical of your userbase, so it isn’t a big deal.”

It’s incredibly unsurprising that virtually every entry plays off of the fact that the loudest forum posters are demanding, whiny and rude–or the fact that no, Blizzard and Warcraft will never reach 100% perfection.

In unrelated news, here’s a new review for you: Tony Ballantyne’s science fiction novel Recursion.

“I’m not lazy, I’m just out of mana”
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I decided to try out the ten-day free trial of Dungeons & Dragons Online, because–well, I enjoy D&D and I enjoy online games. Unfortunately it only took two of the ten days for me to decide to uninstall. Sure, that isn’t enough time to give the game as a whole a fair chance. On the other hand, a game needs to be designed to hook people quickly, and if DDO fails in that regard, I can probably expect it to fail in others as well. Certainly after two days I had little interest in logging in again, so I’d rather spend that time on LotRO.

The irony, of course, is that LotRO was put out by the same company–Turbine. You can certainly see hints of it in the design elements here and there. However, the two are extremely different in how they play.

Dungeon Design

I think I get it–Turbine really wanted to capture the canonical D&D “feel.” Unfortunately what they captured was the feel of a stereotypical D&D session, which is not at all the same as a good one or even a normal one. Absolutely everything seems to be dungeon based, at least early on. The narrator/DM’s voice is heavy-handed, constantly dictating your actions, reactions, and discoveries. It gets old very quickly, and gives the game the feel of being a simple boxed game, not something you’d be willing to spend a monthly fee to play.

Delayed Rewards

Getting to level two took forever compared to games like LotRO and WoW (a day or two of off-and-on playing compared to… what, an hour?). One thing those games got right is that it’s really fun to see quick advancement when you’re first playing your character.

Confusion

I’ve never felt lost for long in a game before. At first Orgrimmar or Shattrath drove me nuts, but it didn’t take long to learn my way around and find everything I needed. In Stormreach I kept getting turned around, and even once I thought I knew where most things were, there were still characters and places I couldn’t find for the life of me. The damn place is incredibly three-dimensional, and doors aren’t exactly labeled, so you can easily end up god-knows where. On the plus side, at least when you click on an instance entrance it tells you what level the instance is, how long it’s likely to take, and what quest it’s for, and allows you to choose the difficulty.

Basic things like the auction house also have a lot less functionality. I can tell it’s based on the same interface used in LotRO, but clearly the execution has been improved drastically for that other game.

Extras

I might have simply not run into it since I didn’t play for long, but I didn’t see signs of a crafting system. Usually after two days of play I would have run into that, at least in games like WoW and LotRO. Since crafting is one of my all-time favorite things to pursue in an MMORPG, that’s a big gap for me.

So, yeah, I didn’t give the game much of a chance. But then, it seemed fairly clear to me that while I might always enjoy playing it a little here or there, I’d never find it worth a monthly fee–at least, not unless I had a lot of extra money to throw around!

Varying Viewpoints

To be sure, however, the game does have its fans (as well as other detractors). So, to give you a few contrasting opinions, here are some links for you (I do think it’s telling that I had a much harder time finding DDO links than links for other games):

• DDOCast–an entire podcast site just for the game
• Playability vs. Vision–a wonderful treatise on how important playability is to a game
• (Third link removed because apparently they don’t like finding out people have linked to them, or something.)

Most of the discussion links I found had something to do with Warcry (which I won’t link to, since as my security software so helpfully pointed out, they use ad servers known to harbor spyware) or were hosted by a gold-seller blog (which I also have no interest in supporting).

Elixir of Coffee
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Wired has a great little post about how Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood on WoW.

There are a lot of folks who swear by Ventrilo, and of course raiding guilds won’t let you in without it. I’ve steadfastly refused to use it, for exactly one of the reasons put forth by the guy writing the article–I’m a woman. When I’m typing in text I find it fairly easy to use language that’s ambiguous in terms of its sexuality; people almost always assume I’m a guy. I like that because I don’t get hit on and I don’t get folks condescending to me just because I’m female. I’m also naturally introverted, and as he pointed out, shy folks tend not to say much on voice chat–which leaves everyone listening to the locker room banter of the raucous teens in most guilds. That’s just never appealed to me; I can’t imagine why.

One of the downsides to the included voice chat in LotRO, I’ve found, is that folks are less tolerant of your not using it even in the simplest of quest fellowships. I’ll have folks making pointed comments about how I really should use it not because we actually need it for anything we’re doing, but because someone in the fellowship doesn’t feel like typing. I’ve taken to telling them my mic is broken. I definitely enjoy the game more when I can’t tell that the bearded dwarf is a 10-year-old, and he can’t tell that my hobbit guardian is a woman old enough to be his mother. Unless I’m getting to be friends with someone on-line I honestly don’t want them to know my gender and age, and if I had a 10-year-old kid playing one of these games I wouldn’t want him chatting away with midde-aged strangers.

I’m glad voice chat is available; I always loved listening in on the snarky jokes when my husband went raiding (he’d leave the output set to speaker so I could listen in). I just think it would be nice if folks would respect the wishes of those who don’t want to broadcast their voice–and their identity–to everyone else. Obviously that isn’t always an option when raiding, but in lesser circumstances it shouldn’t be an issue.

Speaking of raiding, as Foton notes over at AFK Gamer Blizz has started nerfing some of the attunements. It seems they’ve finally realized they’re alienating all but the most hardcore of raiding guilds with much of their complex end-game content and making it hard for even those guilds to bring newer members up to speed. Unfortunately I’ve found I’ve already gotten kind of fed up with the end-game content over there. I want to continue playing, but every time I think about logging in I consider what I could do when I log in and how many times I’ve done it before… and I log in to LotRO instead. Of course, as Van Hemlock notes, there are bunches of other games out there to try too, and his reminder got me to download D&D online last night just for kicks. So far it’s fun but I doubt I’ll want to pay the subscription fee for it. It has the feel of a standard single-player boxed game in which you just happen to run into other people, whereas WoW and LotRO feel as though they’ve taken advantage of the massively multiplayer environment to become another beast entirely. Still, that’s a rather unfair judgment for me to make at such an early stage, so I’ll keep playing it for the rest of the trial period.

Today’s review: Just as a note, today’s book review is The King Arthur Flour Company Whole Grain Baking Book.

“Welcome to my IGNORE list”

I feel so productive this week. I’ve posted the review of Michalko’s Thinkpak. Upcoming: reviews of the King Arthur Flour Multigrain Baking Cookbook and Tony Ballantyne’s “Recursion.” I’m also halfway through an ARC of “Grammar & Style at Your Fingertips,” from Alpha Books’ upcoming new series.

In unrelated news, if you’re a LotRO fan, check out Foton’s new character (mildly maybe-NSFW). He seems to have decided to explore Hobbits & hunters in a rather unusual way. I never thought of Hobbits that way before, but hey. Keep an open mind, right? …Right?

Erm, uh, I’ll be going now…