…and sometimes you’re the poor schmuck on the anvil. EA announces a bunch of layoffs.
You can read the rest for yourselves. I just didn’t want you to think I was too pissed to pay attention to news. Props to Listens-To-Train-Tracks Jennings, on whose blog I read this first.
Posted in Gaming | Tagged Misc. | Leave a Comment »
I feel the need to say this again.
It’s my damn blog and I’ll say whatever I please here, whenever I please, and however I damn well please.
There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with me, but telling me I shouldn’t post what I did is none of anyone’s damned business. I’ve had a hard bloody few days and I’m about sick of taking it in the face with a smile and a “thank you Sir may I have another.” Things were said that were intentionally nasty and now I’m hurt. I’m also pissed. And I’ll keep posting exactly what I like. For the next few days, however, I may not post at all. There are few things more souring to one’s blog inspiration than to be snarked at.
For the record, I feel strongly about giving back when one has a roof over one’s head, enough food to eat, and one isn’t getting raped or beaten up by strangers. I still don’t regret asking others to think about this too.
Remove me from your RSS feeds if you don’t like it. Kthxbai.
Posted in Misc., Site | Tagged community, expectations, rant | Leave a Comment »
Massive Acronym crits you for 237 damage! Massive Acronym will explain itself shortly. This is not a gaming post.
We’re getting on to that time of year where we buy ridiculous amounts of stuff and give friends and family stupid, funny, expensive, and even occasionally useful gifts in the hopes of maybe getting some back. While in my quieter moments I’m not a huge fan of rampant consumerism, I am a huge fan of giving things to people I love and even though I try to do that outside the commercially- or religiously-sponsored times of year, those times really are rather good for thinking about other people.
I could give you a huge spiel but I won’t. It’s Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah/insert-own-holy-day and a bunch of us bloggers thought we’d get together and encourage people to think beyond their own small circles this year. If you already donate to something, yay! If you don’t, consider finding a charity that supports something you feel strongly about, and donating a little of your money or a little of your time.
I thought about listing a few generic charities, but in the end I decided to link a few that I have personally donated to over the last couple of decades. They’re an eclectic bunch — and remember if you have causes of your own, most of these charities are easy to find and, unsurprisingly, very easy to donate to. It’s as easy as buying a game online, and usually cheaper.
Amnesty International (pick your country) or here’s the American donation link (credit card donation page)
Greenpeace International (Int’l donations), or Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace UK, and here’s a bunch more countries!
St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital (this is the single gift CC form; there are regular contribution forms too)
OXFAM (countries list), OXFAM (UK), OXFAM (USA)
The point isn’t so much to blind you with a list of charities and links as to make you think about what you would like to donate something to — whether it’s cash, clothing, time, or even a couple of turkeys. There are millions of people who don’t have what we have, and while I’m pretty cynical about aid in general (blame my UN-brat upbringing), charitable donations aren’t all for naught and not just for making rich people feel better. The list above represents stuff I am passionate about; pick your own and make a difference to strangers this year.
If you’re a blogger and you’d like to get involved, go ahead! If you leave a comment here, I’ll add you to the List of Linkage too, and if you can’t think of what to write we’ve even got an official MBACD (MMO Blogging Alliance Charity Drive) paragraph, below. I’m pretty sure there might be an official logo but, uh, my dog ate my copy (aka I can’t find it).
The holidays are almost upon us again and this year the MMO Blogging Alliance wants to help ensure a good season for all! We’ve decide to pull together and encourage our readers to donate to those less fortunate. It has been a tough year for many families across the world and a little boost can go a long way. Please consider donating to one of the many charities that we recommend or one you select on your own. If you’re a blogger and would like to participate in our drive it is as easy as writing a post, including this at the top, linking to the other posts, and picking a charity to donate to. Let’s show everyone that in 2009 the MMO community can make a positive difference in the world!
The MBACD posse:
Epic Slant (blame Ferrel first!)
Syp at BioBreak says give or face the wrath of his mutant teenagers!
Posted in Misc. | Tagged kindness, MBACD, Misc. | 6 Comments »
This is a pretty specific thing, so it’s difficult to give warning without spoilers, but here goes. If you’re playing a noble dwarf and you’ve got any kind of bonus items (like the Memory Band, those Skill/Attribute tomes, and other stuff), you might want to either use them for the one-shot items or not get too attached to them for the rest.
The spousal unit just realised he’d missed out on using his. How he realised is because I opened my big mouth, so I’m currently writing this from under the desk as he throws things and howls with rage. Well, maybe not quite howling.
It’s only a game after all, but it’s irritating to be 12 hours into the campaign and realise you didn’t use items when you could have and now you don’t have them at all anymore. Come to think of it, those wearable items would be gone regardless, meaning that anyone who plays the Dwarf noble caste Origin story is going to get similarly screwed.
While this is probably relatively minor in the context of the game/progression as a whole, that would still irritate me and it’s a bit of a glaring oversight.
EDIT – as Winged Nazgul pointed out below, this workaround will return the downloadable items to your inventory. I didn’t get the Memory Band back, but I can’t recall what gave that in the first place and besides all it does is give a 1% XP bonus; while that probably adds up to a fair amount over the course of the whole game, it’s not a big deal to me not to have it. Five or ten percent and I might be singing a different tune. Anyway, thanks againWN!
WORKAROUND:
Posted in DragonAge, Gaming | Tagged DA:O | 7 Comments »
Having seen this article over at Sarcastic Gamer, on the need for platform specificity when reviewing a game — in this case, Dragon Age: Origins, since that’s what everyone is talking about this week — and given that the author feels the need to call reviewers moronic, I want to clarify a few things for such of my readers as may actually give a shit. I’m not taking that article personally at all — the author doesn’t know me from Adam, or in this case Eve, but it did make me think.
(I happen to agree about the need for specificity when reviewing anything that comes in different flavours.)
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll already know that I don’t OWN any consoles. I won’t debate why. I’m not anti-console at all, I just don’t happen to have any in the house at the moment, and that may not change for some time. Therefore anything I play, I play on my PC. Besides which this is (mostly) a blog about MMOs, and last I checked you can’t really play MMOs on consoles.
For those of you who are new here, here’s the 411: I. Don’t. Do. Console. Reviews.
So if you read anything here, you can be 10 out of 10, 100%, A+ certain that it’s about a PC version.
Ahhh, that’s better. I don’t feel like quite so much of a moron now, nor nearly as shameless as I was before.
This post was not sponsored by anyone and I haven’t been paid. (Remember, the Endorsement Police Are Watching.)
Posted in Gaming, Misc., writing | Tagged expectations, Misc., review, rhetoric, silly | 2 Comments »
(WARNING: Minor spoilerishness ahead.)
Some of you are sick of hearing about Dragon Age: Origins. I’m looking at you, KIASA boys! Well, suck it up. It’s a great game and to make things worse I’ve only had a few hours to play it since I got it; okay okay, not counting the most-of-the-afternoon I spent on the first session. Since then, however, I’ve been neglecting NaNoWriMo and DA:O. Stupid real life. Stupid stuff that happens. Sometimes I wish I could be 17 again — as long as I get to keep my experience and brains. Physically 17, yay. Mentally 17, god help me no.
So uh, where was I? Ah yes, Ageing. I managed to get a little playtime in yesterday and got through the Origin for a low-class Dwarven warrior. That’s her to the left, of course, and Spinks was right — dwarven lasses are really rather cute. And clearly in possession of superior Gillette shaving power, even when completely down and out. Girl’s gotta have some standards, I guess, even if she is letting a total slimebag pimp out her sister.
That’s the slimebag in the middle. I was very interested to see that Porph’s sister (and other family members) all had the same red hair as she does. Did the game do that? Was it just total coinkidink? I’m almost tempted to start that one again with a different character just to see what they look like.
The Go Dwarf Brigade (you know who you are!) is likely to string me up for this one, but personally I find it hard to see what’s so damn amazing about dorfs. This might be because I’m rather dwarflike in real life, and I play games at least partly to experience a different condition — why be short and round when I can be tall and disproportionately skinny? Besides, I’m really, really bored of big stone underground dwarven cities with lava in them. YAWN! Been there, Ironforged that. Some may think it’s daft to care about whether one is indoors or out when it’s just on a screen, but I’m funny that way. So if I had a hard time connecting with this Origin story it may be more to do with me than with any failings in the story.
In fact I’m sure it is, because the story is the most M-rating deserving of the three I’ve played so far, and it’s rather good. It’s not filled with twists and turns and unexpected events, but that’s become pretty bloody hard to manage in fantasy and thus, for what it’s trying to do — which is to rip your character out of their comfortable or miserable life and send them off to the equivalent of the Ferelden Foreign Legion — it does very well. I’ll add these screenies as thumbnails so those of you who don’t even want to be picture-spoilered can’t see too much; the rest of you can click through.
I like my Dwarven warrior gal, she’s feisty and she takes no shit from anyone — and she has the axes to stick in your skull to prove it. Maybe now that she’s away from the underground city and the whole smothering over-Dwarf atmosphere I might have a better time of it.
But that was only three of the six Origins, and so your dashing reporter saved and started yet another character. See how I work my rampant altoholism into a blogging virtue? As Dennis Hopper would say I am one suave f***.
Anyway, next up I thought I’d go back to the Elves, so I started up a City Elf rogue. Needing a contrast from feisty-cute, I made moody-emaciated Goth. Here she is in the miserable hovel she shares with her widower dad:
All I really know so far is nothing more than you can find out from the blurb, which is that there’s to be a wedding and that my character is somehow involved. (Okay, I know a bit more than that by now but I’m not going to spoil it.) I’ve already seen that the range of dialogue responses is quite large, from the “Oh yay, I’m so brainlessly happy!” to “Grrr, I won’t do this (whatever it is) because I’m a miserable bitch AND I’m feeling emo today. So sod off!” with a selection in between.
One thing I’ve noticed with almost all the Origins is that there really are choices. I’m not entirely sure to what extent they influence the plot of a given Origin since you do after all have to end up in the wider world and at a specific place, but they do provide at least the illusion of choice and even just that is rather nice in an intro phase. I’m quite sure now that the decisions my characters make after the intro will have a long-reaching effect on how the game turns out in detail for them. More importantly for me, choices help you to establish who your character is by deciding what they’d do in given situations, and that’s the essence of role-playing in what is, after all, an RPG. Sure, it’s a little multiple-choice still these days, but Dragon Age: Origins does a pretty good job at masking the mechanics behind a tapestry of high-quality dialogue and acting.
I’m looking forward to the next two hours I can rip, blood-spattered and screaming, out of the fabric of my life!
Posted in DragonAge, Gaming | Tagged altoholism, DA:O, expectations, screenies | 6 Comments »
What?! Three posts in one day? I think the world is about to explode. That or I’ve been kidnapped by Syp and replaced with one of his evil automatons. You decide.
Anyway, the Dragon Age Toolset is now available for download. Note that you’ll have to have a copy of the game registered with the site before it’ll let you at the download link. The file is not quite 500 meg, and that’s all I know right now because I’m still downloading it.
Posted in DragonAge, Gaming | Tagged DA:O, toolset | 8 Comments »
EDIT — I hate to have to add this hours after touting the patch, but be careful. Installing it is preventing people from running the game. This may be related to VS runtime stuff, but either way it’s ridiculously unprofessional and, in my now jaundiced view, rather epic FAIL from Bioware. Not good, guys, really. This forum thread has more info.
= = =
Saturday 7th Edit: BioWare have updated their social site to make the patch actually findable by people, as Spinks reports. Hopefully the next thing will be a patch that doesn’t require a workaround for people running 64-bit OSs.
= = =
That only took 3 days! Actually, the pessimist in me was expecting to download a patch the second I’d installed the game. Maybe I play too many MMOs?
This news is thanks to elite-newshound Werit and comes from RPGWatch:
Dragon Age – v1.01 Patch
by Dhruin, 2009-11-06 08:06:43The first patch is out for Dragon Age and if I read it correctly, among a small handful of fixes they appear to have made it easier on Easy and Normal settings. Grab it here for retail (all languages – 13Mb):
- fixed potential corruption of character statistics
- fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator
- fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable Character Creator
- made Easy difficulty easier
- slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty
- fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays
Steam has already released it for those users.
I noticed with interest that among other things it fixes my “fugly imported characters” issue. Yay! As for making Easy mode easier, all I can say is /boggle. I played both intros on easy mode, and if I could manage it then anyone else can. Then again, I haven’t played any of the dwarven intros and I gather they’re a little more hardcore, as is only fitting for dorfs. Even so… easier easy mode seems like easymode overkill.
Posted in DragonAge, Gaming | Tagged DA:O, patch | 4 Comments »
A rather belated snippet (from end-September), and not a particularly optimistic one at that. Then again we live in interesting economic times, and I like to have something to post about TSW from time to time, even if it’s info-less, screenie-less, betakey-less fluff.
Per VG247:
“Age of Conan dev Funcom is to drop 20 percent of its workforce, according to E24, resulting in a “significant delay” to upcoming MMO The Secret World.
The game had never been officially dated, but was expected in 2010.
The company employs around 300 staff, so 60 jobs look set to go.
Funcom’s currently in the process of relocating to Quebec and it’s debatable legal games-related tax breaks*. It lost $34 million last year.”
Course, TSW could have lost 20% evil marketing staff, which probably wouldn’t be much of a loss at all. (That’s evil marketers, not marketers of evil, for you hair-splitters at the back.)
According to The Secret World’s wikipedia entry the game was expected to ship in 2010 — which could mean anything, and which would have been anyone’s reasonable guess considering the inf0-releases and how long it’s actually been in production.
Still not holding my breath. But can I have my beta spot now, Ragnar?
*Note — I gather this move is now complete.
Posted in MMO, The Secret World | Tagged MMO, TSW | 3 Comments »
Let’s start off with the traditional gamer apology: Ahhh, I didn’t do NaNoWriMo and I didn’t do all my chores and I didn’t quite finish all my work because… I was playing Dragon Age: Origins.
Point the second: yes, this is another DA:O review and impressions thing. You’ll be seeing a lot of that in the next few days and weeks. You know why?
Because the game is just THAT good.
Tertio: I’ll try really hard to put no spoilers at all in this post. Spoilers are just empty calories!
"So, cake or death." -- "Orly?" -- "Ya rly. If you fail, you die."
I must have been one of the lucky ones, because the installation went without a hitch, the configuration utility figured out its settings quite accurately, and there were zero problems trying to get into the game. Well, apart from the fact that my character creator chars get morphed into fugly bastards (or byotches) when I import them, but that wasn’t very hard to get around.
Just one thing I thought was weird: the installer — at least on the CE version, though I’d imagine they’re all the same — doesn’t create a shortcut to the game. That puzzled me for a minute, considering that everything wants to put at least two, better yet five! shortcuts in every possible place (and several anatomically unlikely ones) it can think of. However, the handy dandy configuration utility does come with a “Make desktop shortcut” option … in the repair section. Not my idea of extreme good organisation but hey, it’s just a shortcut. If you don’t know how to make your own by now you probably shouldn’t be near computers without adult supervision.
As you probably know by now, there’s this whole “Look how freaking 1337 I am!! {mypage.bioware.dragonage.epeen.com}” social networking thing going on with Dragon Age too, where the game will take screenshots and update your characters and whatnot on this newfangled internets. It’s worth noting that this is very easily turn on-and-offable in the options. I turned it off to begin with, because I’ve always hated that kind of thing (WoWArmory and Thottbot being two examples) and I’m borderline militia-gun-stocking-paranoid-peering-weirdo when it comes to the internet and my illusion of privacy. Then I turned it back on again, because it was pretty unintrusive, didn’t impact performance in any way I could measure, and I discovered I wasn’t paranoid enough to care.
(Quick tangent: that site is a pain in the ass to navigate. The main bioware player stuff site is fine, but you have to hit MyGames–>DragonAge[platform] to get to the Dragon Age stuff, and once you’re there there is NO easy way to navigate. If you hit the manage characters link, there’s no way back save through the browser. And so on. Yeah, it’s beta, which is why I’m not foaming at the mouth and ranting. But it’s pretty shoddy right now.)
"Dude, not against the wall!"
As for the game itself… It’s not just better than I expected it would be. It’s a LOT better than I expected it would be. These days, I assume a product’s touted greatness is 95% hype, 3% truth, and 2% pure bullshit; well, DA;O is, so far, 99% pure win. (I’m too cheap and not far enough in to give it 100%.)
Each possible origin has its own introduction, and this is no mere 30-second trailer, oh no. At my pace, it’s several hours of adventuring and interaction and lore-reading (a lot of lore reading) and trying to stuff everything that isn’t nailed down into my pockets. My invisible pockets, in the case of the Daelish elf.
I’ve only managed a couple of the “origins” parts of Dragon Age: Origins — a Daelish rogue and a human Mage — but I intend to try all six. This is Syp’s fault, but it’s a brilliant idea. I’m going to experience them before I know too much about the game and the story, and it’ll give me a chance to see if a clear favourite emerges from the pack. Just because I’m a proud, card-carrying member of Elves Aren’t Bad doesn’t mean I’m utterly incapable of playing anyone else. In fact so far my human Mage, Antimony, is ahead in terms of sheer personality and buzz-cut Buddhist nun-look coolness. Plus, her spells are pretty badass.
"You're gross, yet oddly cute. Can I take you home?"
Hrm… what else to write that isn’t spoilerish? The UI is clean and works well, at least at 1920×1200, though double-clicking is a little unresponsive sometimes and the now-you-see-me!/now-you-don’t right click context menu (on some items) is a little counter-intuitive. That’s probably because the game has you right clicking to interact with most things, but to interact with items in inventory you need to right click and hold. I usually end up right clicking 2 or 3 times before I remember. It’s a minor thing, anyway. Other than that the UI is quite nice, which probably makes it wtfbbqgreat! for less sadistically critical people.
Combat is fluid and fairly easy to control even for someone who — like me — is kind of a noob at this type of gameplay. I picked easy mode to begin with because I was afraid I’d get my ass kicked by the first rat I needed to kill, but I could have selected normal and done just fine. Now that I know this, I can change settings on the fly, which is another nice touch.
Oh, and the journal has a Codex section that contains all the stuff you learn as you go along. This is pretty standard in RPGs these days, but this one is done quite well. It’s very easy to see when you have new entries and they’re very easy to read. As an extra bonus, they’re really excellently written. My mage char had a butt-ton of lore to read, as you might expect (hey, I see books lying around, I read ‘em!), but it didn’t really intrude on my gaming. I would play a bit, collect lore and stuff as I went, and then take a few minutes now and then to read the details. It worked very well.
The graphics are pretty good. Actually, they’re excellent, especially the landscapes. The characters aren’t bad, though I’m not a huge fan of the somewhat wooden standing pose (as shown in some of the screenies above). The knees are a little too bent, the legs are a little too far apart, and the hands are a little too far from the body — at least on female characters. I have a sneaking suspicion that the male pose was used as the basis for the female one, and it just doesn’t look quite right. On the whole though it’s not something I really notice unless I’m being critical and staring at screenshots.
"I think this gore-splatter is rather tastefully done, myself."
The gore is … okay. I’ve left it on for now, because scenes and locations are changing often enough at this stage that my characters don’t stay grossly gory for too long. It’s definitely more cartoon-goreish than anything else, which means I’m not bothered by it. I’m not sure how much grit and grimness it adds — but I haven’t turned it off either, so maybe it does add something. In any case, that too is easily turned on and off.
And then, of course, there are the… er, what are they called? Cutscenes? Stuff where you’re not controlling your character. Well, there’s a lot of those. When I first saw how very many there were I got a bit dubious, but in fact it’s been quite seamlessly integrated, and if it suddenly stops once you’re out of the first few sections I’ll end up being quite disappointed. I doubt it will though, because it looks like the cinematic dialogue thing was worked into the whole fabric of the game — and when it’s constant and consistent like that, I have to admit, it’s pretty damn good.
The only downside of that, as I think Syp already pointed out, is that one’s own character remains strangely mute while all the other characters are happily babbling away. The only way we can talk is by picking conversation options, and we never actually say anything in these scenes; the only time the voice option is used is during normal play, where you get the usual “I’m out of mana! Argh! I’m dying” and “I’m on it!” type comments. I can understand the difficulty in doing anything else, but the game is so ambitious and succeeds so well (from my very limited experience) that it’s a real shame the main character is always going to be silent.
What else can I say without actually saying anything about the story? The story is, in fact, the major part of this game, and that’s exactly as it should be. Apparently one’s conversation choices will have an impact throughout a character’s odyssey, but since everyone claims that these days I’m taking it with a grain of salt. All the same, I’m intentionally NOT exploring absolutely every available conversation option with every single available NPC — not just because some of those things just aren’t things my character would say, but also because in many cases you’re supposed to be in a hurry to see someone else or do something else, and I take those hurry-ups seriously. I know I probably shouldn’t, because games never seem to actually say “Ah, sorry, you were supposed to hurry to talk to the old mystic and instead you dilly-dallied about the camp opening every damn box and chest and stuffing your pockets, and now the guy you were supposed to go and save… well, he’s dead. Abort, retry, restart?” But they should, and I’m still hoping that this one might. Even if it doesn’t, that’s how I play. Don’t tell me we’re in a tearing hurry to save the world then let me faff about scratching my butt for three days — that’s immersion-breaking.
"No, I'm Antimony, not Sinnead. Who's Sinnead?"
But lo, there was story, and the story is good. I don’t even mind watching NPCs ignore me while they’re arguing with each other, especially not if I get the option to tell kings something like “You’d have to get really lucky” when they ask if they might know my name. Gotta love sass.
I’d give the voice acting 8 out of 10, and I’m really, REALLY mean when it comes to tearing apart crappy dialogue and wooden voices. So far the worst offenders were the three hapless humans my Daelish rogue (Eloise) encountered right at the start of her Origins — the characters aren’t very well done artistically, and they’re not all that well acted either. However, it only got better from there until I was well and truly sucked in. There are a few famous and semi-famous names on that voice acting roster, too: Kate Mulgrew (the gravelly she of Voyager), Tim Curry (always a winner!), Steve Valentine (best-known to me as Nigel the forensics guy in Crossing Jordan), Claudia Black (Farscape, SG1) and others whose names are too small for me to read without my contacts.
So what does all this amount to? If you liked Baldur’s Gate then you’ll probably love this. I didn’t play that game much because my computing power was totally gimped back then and because I found the whole party UI thing incredibly frustrating — but mostly because I couldn’t get the game to run reliably and decently. For that and various other reasons, the whole party-RPG thing kind of passed me by until Neverwinter Nights 1 (not the AOL version), which was enjoyable though ended up being a damn sight more fun as something you played with other — real — people.
I seem to recall reading something to the effect that there were no multiplayer plans for DA:O. But if that’s true, why is one of the installation folders (dragonage –> modules) called “single player”? Eh? Riddle me that, Batman!
Anyway — if you don’t have DA:O and you’re wondering whether you should, I hope this (and the million other reviews) was useful in helping you decide. If you’re planning on getting it but not right now, that’s fine. Get it whenever — it’s not like the gameplay will degrade if you don’t get it right now. The only difficulty you might have is avoiding spoilers, though to be blunt anyone with the teeniest sense of plot can guess that the Origins parts don’t go well for one’s character. After all, they have to have a reason to leave what they’re doing and head out into the wider world…
Gah! The Spoiler Police are beating down my door! /flees
Posted in DragonAge, Gaming | Tagged DA:O, design, expectations, launchmadness, review | 17 Comments »
