So Yeah, I've Applied at Blizz

Honest to god email I sent to resumes@blizzard.com after the break. I'm doomed.

For anyone curious, the position listing is here. When they 'send for me' in a private jet made of golden diamonds, I won't forget all the little people that got me to where I am today. And where I am today is sitting in the teacher's room of some funky little Japanese elementary school, watching the clock tick down on my final hour (literally) of employment here on this side of the ocean. From here on out, it's the unemployed life for me. Hooray, I can make weekday raids if I wake up early enough in the morning, and jump on the computer in my underwear! Things are already looking up, hearing back from Blizzard will just be icing on the cake, baby!

The honest to god email I just sent, thereby sealing my fate on the Blizzard "spam" filter:

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from Richard Ericksen
to resumes@blizzard.com
date Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:33 AM
subject Game Designer
mailed-by gmail.com

Hello! This is an application for a Game Design position on the World of Warcraft team.

As I sit here staring at the empty email field, agonizing over what to write, I realize I have no idea what I'm supposed to put in this little box. Nothing that could sum up how intimidating it is to try and make "resumes@blizzard.com" understand how badly I want to do this. How, no matter what I type here, it will feel like the wrong thing the instant I hit the send button. My only option left is to just be myself, and hope that I can make someone at Blizzard feel like I'm worth adding to the team.

At any rate, I think I've come to appreciate what scientists must feel like asking for continued grant research funding. Trying to hope the person on the other end of the line can appreciate the inarticulate and nebulous... thing... you do. The thing you're basically asking for permission to continue doing, with their support. It's a wholly different feeling than a farmer must feel typing up a bill for 372 potatoes delivered to a supermarket chain.

So I guess there's that.

I've typed up a design document detailing what I feel would be an interesting raid dungeon. Eleven fully realized boss encounters, with trash mob descriptions, architecture layouts, and back story / lore woven in where appropriate. I know that I can do this, or any other task thrown at me, full time. I've taken various jobs in my life as they come along, but this email is the culmination of finally doing what it is I really want to do. I want to work at Blizzard, maintaining World of Warcraft. The design document, as well as my resume, past history, and various other pertinent information has all been compiled on a website at http://ixoencounters.blogspot.com. That website is basically my application, and nothing more.

I'm not sure how many people apply this way. For all I know, everyone does, and the person reading this email is groaning and rolling their eyes so far back in their head that it hurts. You really shouldn't do that. One day your face will freeze like that and then people will think you're a zombie. You'll have to learn the Thriller dance, and when you go out to dinner your date will order the brains for you every time whether you actually like brains or not. It will just seem like the polite thing to do. While that might be an awesome prospect, and better than wading through rambling applications for design positions, your mother probably wouldn't approve, and you'd end up being that awkward guy at Thanksgiving dinner smashing your hands around on the table looking for the mashed potatoes, because, you know... you wouldn't really be able to see where they are on the table anymore, eyes rolled back and all.

So knuckle down and check out the site! Your mother will thank you, your dates will thank you, and everyone at Thanksgiving will be happier as a result because gravy belongs on the turkey, not the tablecloth.

Thanks for your time,

Richard Ericksen
http://ixoencounters.blogspot.com

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Yeah. My only hope is that they get a zillion boring apps, and mine is a unique ray of sunshine into their otherwise grey lives of Word document attachments and salary requirements.

Feel free to take a look at the final link. There are a few extra bosses that I didn't post here, and some of the suggestions made their way in (and some didn't, don't hate me).

I'll keep y'all posted.

[continue...]

Hate's a Pretty Big Word

Something I've never quite understood is humanity's deep seated need to hate. I hate math, or I hate country music. I hate Oprah, or I hate when it rains. I don't pretend to love everything, but I find it so much easier to go through life just indifferent to certain things. Actively hating something requires a concerted effort, and isn't passive like just not caring. There's that saying that it requires 43 muscles to frown and 17 to smile (while there may in fact only be 36 facial muscles total), but regardless, it takes zero to just not care one way or the other. I love seeing people get worked up in a frenzy over something, especially when that something is completely frivolous.

The other version of this hate, of course, comes in a more distinct flavor... the "us vs them" or "this vs that" variety. I hate the Ps3, Xbox360 fuggin roolz, or better yet: who cares which one you like, at least it's not a Wii. It's been coming up a lot on my blog here in the form of "WoW is fucking lame" or "Darkfall sucks" or whatever. The thing I think people aren't realizing, though, is that I never really said Darkfall sucked, I just wasn't creaming my jeans over it, and that was apparently the wrong response. It's not good enough for me to just say 'I like chocolate ice cream' on my blog. I apparently am supposed to be saying "I like chocolate, and anyone that likes vanilla is a fucking carebear sissy. When you spill chocolate ice cream on your fucking shirt, it STAINS. You fucking losers with your 'white' ice cream make me want to fucking puke. Grow a pair of fucking balls and eat some REAL ICE CREAM (kthxbai)".

The Wii version would go something like "I like Rocky Road. Not everyone can handle those fucking almonds, or whatever the fuck those nuts are in there with the marshmallows. I dunno what the fuck it is, but that shit has texture, man! It's fucking extreme! I don't give a shit if you eat Choco-Whammy Fudgealot or Buttertoffee Surprise, but for fuck's sake, don't come home with a gallon of boring old vanilla. God! Everyone eats that shit, it sold like 11 million tubs last month. How fucking dull can you be? This is Sparta ICE CREAM, live on the edge or GTFO, yo".

The best part is, people are serious. If you're not with them, you're against them, and all we're doing is eating an ice cream cone.

As a specific example, the 'Console War' is ridiculous.

Look:

... yeah. Video game systems are like Pokemans, and I got em all. That kinda throws the whole 'us vs them' thing out the window. OH BUT IXO, AREN'T YOU THE LUCKY ONE. YOU JUST BUY EVERY FUCKING THING THAT COMES OUT, AND I DON'T HAVE THAT OPTION.

Um. So your point is that you hate something not because it sucks, or because you're angry, but because you can't afford to own it? How silly is that? That's called sour grapes, and you're just pissed because your mom won't buy it for you. That doesn't mean it's bad.

Another reason given is because Vanilla Ice Cream somehow ruins the ice cream market, and ruins the chances of Yummy Scrummy Plummy from getting a foot in the door, because how can YSP compete with 11 million fucking zombies just content to eat vanilla? It certainly has nothing to do with the fact that YSP ice cream is sitting on the shelf half melted in a dirty shoe. When I'm in the ice cream section of the supermarket, and I see a fresh gallon of vanilla, or a dirty gym sneaker dripping something vaguely purple, I'm probably going to take the vanilla. Hell, maybe I'll even give YSP a try, just because I love all kinds of different ice creams, and it's not every day you see a moist Chuck Taylor in the freezer section, but I'm not going to force myself to eat it if it's gross.

And then, lo and behold, I get yelled at for having the audacity to buy a size 10 of YSP. God forbid I might not have liked it, and relate that story to the people who might read my own personal blog that I write here myself for me on my computer. Even further, by buying that shoe, I'm apparently ruining the company's chances to compete in the market. If everyone buys a shoe tomorrow, it will destroy their company when you all get athelete's foot in your gums or whatever. It's not the company's fault you got fever blisters on your lips the size of a lemon, it's YOUR fault for being curious enough to try it. Way to go. YSP is ruined now, thanks to you buying a shoe of it at the liquor store's dairy section.

Seriously.

At the end of the day, though, I'm not going to write up some thing about how much I hate YSP, or the people who eat it. I just don't care, really. In all the things I write, I think that tends to be a recurring theme. Reagrdless of what you may have thought I said, if you read it again you'll see I didn't hate Warhammer oops "Melonberry McNutNut", I just didn't really like the taste, and I wasn't going to eat it. Hell, I even tried it again later and changed my mind (read the last paragraph). In the end though, I decided I just didn't really like Melonberries, and stopped buying it each time I went to the store. That's a HUGE difference between "faggots who eat Melonberry McNutNut live in there basements with they're grandmas and I bet your gonna get a burmhingham housecall for desert tonite from grammy lololol". The same goes for Yummy Scrummy Plummy.

Thinking back to the Console Warz again for a second, there's enough room in my freezer and money in my wallet to buy YSP, vanilla, and still have room left over for frozen pizzas and ... what... churros...? What do people even put in their freezers these days? I have like rice as far as the eye can see. Why would you limit yourself to one flavor? Even if it's really good, don't you want to mix it up from time to time? If you don't like chocolate, no one is going to force you to eat it (and I won't force myself), but it doesn't mean you have to HATE it.

Just be indifferent.

Let those who are into that kind of thing enjoy it, and just go on enjoying whatever flavor you like. We can both be right, and nobody needs to be wrong. See how nice that works out?

It's not rocket surgery.

[continue...]

I'm a WoW Tourist, Apparently

Wow. I turned on the laptop at work today to find "Syncaine" had apparently ripped apart one of my posts word by word, offering a rebuttal for every other sentence. He even went on to the comments section of my post, and attacked anyone who had anything to say there, as well. Awesome. Apparently, I'm not allowed to offer up an opinion on Darkfall, since I'm just a WoW loving carebear, or something. While I could go back through his post, and offer a word by word rebuttal, I honestly don't care enough to, but I will touch on a few choice gems, because this is a blog, and blogging is what I do here.

I won't bother with a numbered bullet list or anything silly, because that's just not how I operate (OVER HERE IN CAREBEAR WOW LAND--- lol, sorry, I'm honestly not going to do that the entire post).

The one most specific thing that really stuck out during the entire post was the "clinging to your Macbook and cursing Windows through your tears" syndrome. Like, you hate WoW. We get that. So you went and bought Darkfall. Way to go, have fun in there. But the bitter, angsty "YOU GUYS ALL SUCK BECAUSE YOU PLAY THAT ONE GAME EVERYONE ELSE DOES WAHHH" thing just really comes off as silly and childish. The fact that people prefer different playstyles is something I can fully appreciate. The theme of my article was not "Darkfall sux lol and ne1 who plays it is sux 2 lol". It was more along the lines of "I bought and tried Darkfall, it isn't the game for me, and this, this, and this is why".

I mentioned a few key points, and will touch on them again. I won't bother to copy and paste quotes from his article, it feels petty.

Shallow Combat - Darkfall is a circle jerk. You shoot arrows from a distance (yes, I understand that's how arrows work), and then close in, pull out a polearm, and circle strafe. There are two 'moves' for melee combat that I had played far enough to encounter. The vertical chop, and horizontal chop. I understand that later, you get 4 other moves. And those moves are the exact same for every weapon. Pull in, knock back, powerful thrust, and ... something else. Wow. Thrilling combat system you have there.

Shallow combat also includes mob AI, which Syncaine bothered to compare to WoW's infamous 2,2,2,3,2,4 system. The mobs in Darkfall aren't exactly rocket surgeons, either, and while 'plate doesn't fall out of the sky' I certainly didn't have a hard time shooting my wand over and over (and over and over) at some humanoids that couldn't figure out how to navigate a 30 degree ramp leading up to me. In fact, I wasn't alone in this adventure, and noticed about 7 other people that had discovered this same "combat mechanic", and we all just shot our wands at them over and over (we ran out of arrows) until these mobs died, then we'd loot them (banded armor I think they offered?), and wait for them to respawn. I once got jumped by a group of mobs while exploring some ruins, and then realized they weren't able to attack me if I stood on a planter box 2 feet high. So I would jump off the planter box, swing swing swing, and then jump back up on the planter box and rest. I'd offer screenshots of this awesome location, but the screenshot button (you know, the one in the key bindings menu?) didn't work, and I got tired of alt-printscreen-open-Photoshop-new-document-paste-ing. Sometimes, if confronted on a perfectly flat piece of terrain with nothing to jump on, combat was interesting. If, that is, you consider spamming left click to be a huge improvement over spamming 2.

I mentioned that I respected LotRO, but not because it was 'like WoW'. I respect LotRO because it's the most finished MMO besides WoW available to play. If Darkfall was half as polished as LotRO, I would have noted that. Instead, it plays like a half finished, rushed product... but still took 7 years to make?

Macroing - I botted in WoW near the end of BC, and had my original account banned. This isn't something I'm horribly proud of, but it's hardly anything I'm hoping nobody discovers, either. I'm pretty upfront about the whole thing, and I even wrote about my banning, and the 'lesson I learned' from the ban. I lost three fully geared toons, and a lot of invested time in my characters. In the end, it was a good lesson, though, because when I came back to playing WoW (after trying many other games), I took the game for what it was: just a game. I play WoW to have fun these days, and whenever I start to lose track of that I take a step back.

Before I even get around to the macroing, thing, I really want that to soak in. These are games we're playing, and they're meant to be enjoyable. I don't understand the need to even try and piss on one another over the choice of game we play. Even in my most scathing 'reviews' of the Warhammer beta (which ended up having me banned for breaking the NDA), I always ended with "i sure hope they iron it out, and make a fun game worth playing, but what I just played wasn't it". I made a comparison to baseball, and subsequently got called out for erroniously thinking it took 22 people to play baseball; I honestly don't know/don't care, because baseball isn't really my thing. But do baseball and basketball players throw tomatoes at each other? Do they need to somehow justify that their sport is the 'better' one? I doubt it, and don't get why we need to do that. The Xbox vs PS3 thing is funny to me, because I own every console. The only people who get honestly pissy about stuff like this are those that can only beg mom for one subscription per month. I'd happily subsribe to three MMOs if they were all worth playing.

Anyway, yeah, the macroing. I'm sure some people think this is an awesome advance in gameplay mechanics. Setting up your Logitech G15 keyboard to hit P every 10.1 seconds, and then binding P to be the 'left click' action. Then you equip your mining pick, sit in the middle of town, and stare at the screen while your keyboard plays for you. This is what Glider did for my rogue --although it was "walk around in a circle Sinister Strike-ing any spiders you encounter until they die, and then loot them", which even then, is (sadly) more fun to watch. This isn't playing the game. In Darkfall, it isn't even frowned on. It seems to be expected. Even Aventurine has taken the stance that 'as long as you're staring at the screen while your macro plays, that's cool'.

I noticed 30 people crowded around the same rock 5 feet from the bank, 'working on the chain gang' and thought 'is this what I'm supposed to be doing?' Then I walked around the corner, and saw 2 people 'crouch walking' into a wall to skill up their 'walking while crouched' skill. Awesome. Have fun with that. If this is the kind of gameplay you enjoy, then by all means, have at it. I won't tell you not to play, and certainly I won't cry about it after you leave WoW to move on to something 'better'.

The PK system - For a game with so much clamoring about how fucking carebear WoW is, it certainly didn't like me killing someone. While it's 'neat' that I can kill some member of my own faction, the game swiftly kicked me in the nuts for doing so. Huh? Oh, so it's an option, but the WRONG option? Oh, wait... let me just make sure I understand this correctly: so, I'm a human, and I should only kill other orks? Gee... that reminds me of some other game, I can't think of the name off the top of my head, though.

The One Spec - Yes, everyone is training earth magic and using the same weapon. Bonedead even pointed out to me (helpfully, thank you Bonedead) that I was totally shooting myself in the foot by using knives. That knives were effectively broken in their current implementation. I mention that having only one toon per server (and only server to choose from) really limits what playstyles you can engage in depending on your mood. Again, I'm sure the hardcore roleplayers are used to only having one online persona or something, but last night I played my 68 warrior for a little bit (instead of my 80 warlock or priest), and actually had a pretty fun time with it. That's simply not an option in Darkfall. I'm sure that makes me a huge loser, or something? I don't even see how that could POSSIBLY have a negative connotation, but I guess it does.

Whatever. Have fun with your "mounts that are rare drops from herbing" (seriously?), and raiding other guild camps naked. If it makes you happy, then HAVE FUN DOING IT. It doesn't need to be some big thing. Even in all of the examples I've given above, I give examples from my own (milquetoast, WoW?) point of view. I'm not saying having every single player be the same spec is the WRONG way to play, I'm just saying I don't prefer it.

One last note, that I'm sure will make Syncaine's head explode with WoW Fanboy Overload if it hasn't already: Maybe you're new here, but I'm actually moving back to America to try and get a job at Blizzard designing raid encounters.

Still there? I think WoW is honestly a good enough game that I want to actually try and help make it. That's how 'into WoW' I am. I've got a fully fleshed out raid dungeon with over 12 unique encounters fully drawn up (architecture, trash mobs, boss encounters, questlines) that I'm putting the final touches on backstory and lore for for final submission to Blizzard as a resume for a Game Design position. While I'm sure my 'MMO street cred' level just plummeted off the charts on your little gauge, in reality, what you think of my gaming choice has no impact on what I will choose to play. Not like 'a little'... I mean none. And while you may think Darkfall is zomg awesome, is it awesome enough that you think you could work for Aventurine to help make it that much better? Or are you content to just take what you're given, hold it close to your chest, and cling to it while cursing WoW through your tears?

[continue...]

A Simpler Time

I've been busy as all hell getting a visa lined up for my wife. We rode the bullet train twice (4 hours in each direction) on Monday to get to the American Embassy in Tokyo and get the ball rolling. We're now waiting for paperwork from them to come in the mail, at which point we'll need to go back to Tokyo for an interview, and if all goes well we should have a visa lined up for her in like two months. Ugh. This has really cut into my gaming time (Peggle on the DS doesn't count).

Ulduar is coming, albeit slowly. I've logged in on various nights to do my cloth cooldowns, to see the guild message of the day asking everyone to 'read up on the Ulduar encounters on mmo-champion and watch PTR videos of the fight'. It makes me want to puke. Jesus Christ. The last raid I actually did with the guild, I brought this up, basically along the lines of:

"...you're not really serious about wanting everyone to watch videos of unreleased raid content, right? Are we honestly going to be expected to zone in for the very first time on the first new raid content in a while, expected to already know what our role is exactly going to be, exactly where to stand, and exactly what to do?"

This was met with awkward silence; the implication being that that's exactly what they were expecting, duh.

I'm a healer now, and I don't think people like pissing off healers, because for the most part healers tend to be the 'well, I'm taking my fucking ball and going home, then' types. I've been familiar with this attitude from my days of main tanking, be it raids or 5 mans, and know there's a bit of tiptoeing that goes on around tanks and healers. People don't want to piss you off, because you're harder to replace. Nobody has any issues whatsoever telling the warlock or rogue to shut the fuck up and eat a dick if they don't like something.

So the response to my:

"well, fuck it. You guys can knock yourselves out and have fun with that, but I intend to zone into Ulduar with no idea at all what's in store for me. I've intentionally avoided reading mmo-champion for the past few weeks, because the first time we down a boss (probably after a good night or two of wipes), I want to be surprised at what drops"

...was just more awkward silence.

We've gotten so ingrained with having wowhead open on the second monitor (side note, what's up with the full page warhammer adverts there recently?), or having quest helper paint a big dumb arrow on our screen, that going into a fight without knowing how it's going to play out before we EVER attempt it is silly. I used to scoff at the 'game guide' section by the register at Gamestop, or when someone behind the counter would offer to sell me some volume that accompanied the single player RPG I was buying ("ha! no thanks, I like to PLAY the game, not just go through the motions as I read along"), but that attitude flys in the face of thottbot, wowhead, or any of the data mining sites that are so prevalent today.

The only solution to this is (I hate to say it) PvP, or infusing PvE mobs with random ability trees. Make each mob have a set of 50 skills they can choose 3 from randomly. No one is going to sit outside the bosses room being like "...and if he cleaves spread out, and if he drops a meteor clump up, and if he chain lightnings spread out, and if he summons a shade nuke it, and if he summons...". The entire pep talk would be like "don't suck, let's pull and see what happens", and then after a fight, we could be like "I saw a chain lightning targeting healers at 35%, what did you guys see?"...

I touch on this in a previous article, one of the earlier ones I wrote here on this domain. Until that happens, there will always be guilds that are just content to rip strats from those that actually PLAY the game, and those that actually play the game are limited to the Public Test Realm, something that isn't even technically a part of the World of Warcraft. It's tiring.

For now, I'll happily turn my speakers off during the explanation of any fight I haven't tried before and be the one in the raid that has no idea what everyone else is doing. That's hardly the optimal way to raid... and I don't mean hardly optimal in the 'we don't already know the fight inside out before having done it', but hardly optimal in the sense that '90% of them are operating with this amount of knowledge, and I'm operating with much less'. Ideally (for me) we'd all be operating with no knowledge. It would be wipes, and it would be frustrating, but fuck, isn't that the point of raiding?

Bleh.

I miss the 1.3 patch note summary:

I miss leveling my first toon, before I knew about optimal DPS rotations, or what GCD stood for. Now that I know, I'm expected to know.

You can't go back, and it sucks.

/2 WTB [massive head trauma] PST

[continue...]

Darkfall Final Impressions

So yeah. Darkfall. I kinda did the MMO rollercoaster on that one. Went from "oh gee how will I ever get a copy" (which ended up being surprisingly easy, even here in Japan), to "jesus what the fuck why won't it just launch", to "hmm, this is actually kinda neat", to "well, yeah, now that THAT'S over, what to do now". This whole period went over in the span of a week or so, but unlike the "gosh she's cute how will I ever ask her out" to "oh man why did I say that at dinner, god I'm so stupid!" to "wow, she's actually a pretty swell girl" to "jesus christ do I need to change my phone number now or what" scenario, dumping Darkfall was as easy as removing my credit card info from the website and hitting the 'cancel subscription' button.

There's a lot of people on the fence about Darkfall, and even more willing to play it just because it isn't WoW. I think this is an unexplored genre in the MMO department that needs to be fully tapped. If you could make a game cheaply enough, with few enough people on the dev team to just implement a character creator and maybe one town and one dungeon, you could probably sell a few hundred thousand copies of the box alone to the 'at least it's not WoW demographic'. You wouldn't even need to set up a billing department, since no one would actually SUBSCRIBE to your game, they'd just buy the box, spend a week with it, then move back to whatever they were playing before.

Darkfall and Age of Conan fit that description perfectly, and Warhammer got maybe one month out of me. LotRO is probably the only other game I really respect out of the 'non-WoW' batch of MMOs I've played (but I never subscribed to LotRO, so there you go), and I have yet to actually even make it to the character creator in Coh/CoV. I signed up for a trial, and the downloader was so fucking slow that my free trial ran out before I ever actually got the game installed. Don't even get me started on EVE. Hoo boy.

People in Darkfall are doing the same thing I saw people doing in AoC, and it won't be the last time I see people do this. They're punishing themselves, and forcing themselves to play a sub par game, BUT AT LEAST THEY AREN'T PLAYING WOW. They repeat this mantra over and over on the game's official forums, in the game's public chat channels, and somehow decide this makes it all worth while.

It won't be a shocking revelation to anyone who reads this blog with any regularity, when I say I'm going back to WoW, because WoW doesn't really bother me. :)

When I was young, and I was learning about the Jews and Nazis (oh boy here we go), I remember specifically asking my father one day after school why some of them didn't just lie. Like (I know this isn't how it exactly worked here, but roll with it for a second), say a Nazi kicks down the door, and there are a bunch of people standing around. They're going to kill all the Jews in the room... I didn't get who in their right mind would be like 'yeah I'm one of the guys you're looking for to kill'. Again, horrible example. I know, okay? But throughout history, there have been these people that are always like 'I'd rather die than renounce my faith, blah blah blah' and to me, I was always like 'why would you willingly DIE, rather than just say you changed your mind on something'? You wouldn't have to actually BELIEVE what you were saying, but the guys with guns just want to hear you say it. But, people are gonna be like "well, when I get to Heaven, Jesus will pat me on the head and be like GOOD JOB, DUDE".

Maybe this is why I just don't get the whole religion thing, but is Jesus that much of a dick that he's gonna care about what you SAID? Isn't he like, all knowing, and can tell deep in your heart you were still 'on his side', you were just trying to avoid bullet-in-the-head syndrome? Wouldn't it be better to LIVE, on the off chance you can escape the guys with the guns, and then tell your story, or spread your faith or whatever afterwards? Seems like it would be a more interesting story, too, to be like "and then they were going to shoot me, but I LIED and told them I renounced my faith, thereby becoming a Jesus Double Agent... deep down inside, though, I was still keepin it real". There's obviously a line to be drawn. Like if they want you to renounce your faith, and then jab burning coals in the eyes of those that won't... but then again, I'd be the one being like "FRED, LET'S BOTH RENOUNCE DUDE (WINK WINK, NUDGE NUDGE)".

Okay, I think I'm coming to grips with why I'm never in church or anything. Hm.

ANYWAY, this all had a point, and here it is!

Why suffer through BAD MMOs, for the sake of upholding your MMO MORALS? Every time I try a new MMO, I come into it with an open mind. There's no magical force keeping me bound to WoW, and if I ever find a game that's better, I'll happily abandon WoW and move on. It's just that, so far, there hasn't been any game that's horribly compelling. Darkfall (which is what this post started abaout, before it entered the Jesus Double Agent realm) is just not a good game. The combat is horrifically shallow, the supposed "freedom of being a PK" is flawed, and the game has very little going for it.

By removing classes, they just lump EVERYONE into the same mold. Everyone uses polearms and trains earth magic. Every single person shoots arrows at you from a distance, and wears plate. The 'big dangerous world' mechanic is totally ruined when they have mining and timber resources located inside city walls. People aren't dicouraged from macroing to upgrade certain skills, as long as they're physically present at the keyboard while they do so. So people watch reruns of Frasier in a window while they pew pew pew their wand straight into the sky, thereby 'leveling their magic'.

Darkfall, from what I saw, had exactly three things going for it:

Fear of death. The ability to wear armor you find (no "I'm only able to wear cloth"). One character per server.

Two of those even have downsides: Everyone wears plate, and you can't enagage in different playstyles to match your mood. Sometimes I want to DPS, sometimes I want to heal. I guess you *could* do that in Darkfall, but it'd be like having a druid specced 24-23-24. Sometimes I want to go 51+ points deep into a tree, and to do that (and subsequently undo that) takes way too much time. Some people love locking themselves into that one distinct playstyle, but I play these games to HAVE FUN. Darkfall isn't very fun.

That's what it always comes back to for me, and I feel like enough people are familiar enough with my stance on it. The more I spout it, the more I just feel like I'm just typing the same post over and over again.

I won't suffer through a game that isn't fun, and at this point WoW is still much more fun than Darkfall. This doesn't make me a WoW fanfoi, it makes me a FuN fanboi. I just don't care to punish myself in my liesure time, so sue me.

But I will miss those legendary quest lines...

[continue...]

Wow....

Women are ultra-impressionable beings, and therefore are easily controlled by aliens and the elite. The main purpose of women on Earth (that is, what aliens have programmed them to do) is to enslave men via relationships. Women are obsessed with relationships and love (due to alien programming), and don't care about anything else in life. They would have men believe that being in a relationship is one of the most important things in existence, not realizing that men couldn't care less about being in a relationship--and rightly so. Furthermore, women force men to waste their precious time and resources on them. This demonic charade (i.e., relationships) has gone on for far too long and obviously has no end in sight. Thus, you can blame women for the downfall and utter hopelessness of humanity.

I was reading Overcompensating today (a new webcomic I've discovered), and came across this one from around January in the archives. At first it was just a funny little comic, but then in the text below, he links a few wack-o websites that are good for a chuckle.

Truthism.com has to be my favorite pick of the litter (I didn't delve too deep), with my favorite part being how every three or four paragraphs, an irrefutable TRUTH is revealed. The first paragraph of this post here is filed there under WOMEN, but there's a few other winners in the pile.

For example:

Apparently the earth is hollow (as every planet is), and contains a sun on the inside. The people living on Inner Earth are very advanced, and while some know of those living on the outside, not all of them do. The north and south poles don't actually exist (they wrap around, leading to Inner Earth), and we've all seen the proof that this is so, because Aroura Borealis is light from the inner sun shining out of the hole in the top of the Earth.

Traveling to the Poles One cannot travel to the North Pole or to the South Pole for two reasons:

1.) The North Pole and the South Pole do not exist. In their place are polar openings that lead into Inner Earth.

2.) Anyone en route to a polar opening is eventually stopped by Outer Earth guardsmen.

...and then it just goes on to the next subject after that. No other further details on the "Outer Earth guardsmen", as everyone (obviously) knows who they are. It goes on to have YouTube videos of a newscaster blinking, and apparently her eyelids are "totally fucking reptilian" or something.

Hmmm...

There's a quote on freedom of speech that I can't quite dig up on the net right now, but the general gist of it goes something like this:

The greatest test of whether or not you actually believe in freedom of speech is when you're confronted by someone you don't agree with.

This isn't on some vanilla level of "I'm in favor or Law Q, and these guys are against it". It's more of whether or not you believe someone should be able to have a website up endorsing the virtues of pedophilia, or justifying the genocide of another race. Once you begin to draw a line... "he can say sex feels good, but he can't say sex with an 8 year old feels good" then you're suddenly blurring the matter, because YOU YOURSELF don't agree with it. Regardless of whether or not the law is on your side. I'm kind of going to an extreme here, over some silly "the government is full of reptiles wearing human masks" thing, but it all falls under the bigger umbrella. I can point at this website and laugh, but I would never want it taken down. I doubt anyone does, in this particular case. It's mostly harmless, and good for a chuckle while I wind down the hours after my classes for the day, but before I can go home.

The internet is a beautiful thing, and while I may roll my eyes at the person that takes their time to type all that up, I respect their right to do so. My internet raid dragons aren't real, either, but I'm not trying to convince people that they are. Conspiracy websites are funny, and they invariably remind me of Maddox's post about the whole 9/11 'conspiracy'. His basic premise being that if the government has no beef about strapping bombs to a plane to knock down two towers in the middle of New York in broad daylight, that same government would probably be able to take out anyone with an AOL and Geocities account as well... : /

You go, truthism.com; with your crazy, bad self.

You just... go, girl.

[continue...]

Darkfall PK Issues

So, I mentioned in my comments of my last post that I had gone PK, and killed another member of my own faction. The whole scenario basically played out like this: I'm killing mobs, someone else runs by with three other mobs on him. Something happens (this is where it gets fuzzy, mob aggro isn't as clear cut as it is in WoW), but the mobs end up switching over to me and I'm already low on health. I die, while the first guy stands by and watches, then proceeds to loot my corpse for all my shit. I respawn back in town, pissed, and grab some spare gear out of the bank, then come back and kill that guy. I'm now flagged as a PK (player killer), and anyone can kill me freely without any repercussions (they don't get flagged, since they're killing a 'bad guy'). That's fine, whatever. I knew when I killed the guy that this would happen, but now I'm kind of in a hole with no way to get out.

I actually didn't know the flagging would be permanent. If you 'misfire' a spell into a crowd, you get flagged for ten seconds (AoE and splash damage hits everyone, not just the bad guys, which I think is cool). If you do it twice within those ten seconds, you get flagged for 2 minutes. If you outright kill someone (as I did), it's permanent. The only way to unflag yourself is to go kill someone on the opposing faction (or perhaps another PK). You need to basically 'do a good deed' to get back in good graces. And herein lies the problem.

After I got flagged, it was all of about 3 or 4 minutes before someone came along and mowed me down. Whatever, right? Then I respawn, but not back in town. I spawn at a 'chaos stone' out in the wilderness, with nothing but my starter weapon (which I had foolishly chosen to be a wand in an effort to level up my pew pewing skills). I couldn't waltz back into town to get my money out of the bank, because the guard towers zap me with lightning bolts if I get within about 50m of the town border. It took me a long while to realize that there are banks out in the wilderness for PKs to use. Like, a long while. There should be a help window that pops up when you first go rogue that explains all of this, but whatever.

Okay, so I'm a PK now. What next?

Well, I could do a villainous laugh and just live my life this way, but I kind of want to get back to being able to go to town, at least at this point in my toon's life. Maybe later, when I'm loaded with cash and uber weapons, I can go on a killing spree and join some PK guild, but in the meantime I'm naked with a piece of shit wand and no way to change this. I need to go out in the bush and find some lowbie ork to slay, but I'm trying to do so in a pair of soiled panties with a twig in my hand.

I wander further and further north, into ork territory, and get repeatedly raped by the opposing faction that have actual weapons and armor on. There's one guy, "mr Thomas", who manages to get me 2 or 3 times in the night. He's what I fully expected the Darkfall crowd to be like, but he's still a blue (not a PK, he's just killing me because he can). He chops me down, and as I die, he emotes /air_guitar (oh jeez), /laugh (wow you got me), and runs around in circles /cheer-ing. Yeah, dude, I get it, you sure got me, zzzz. Can you do the finishing move now and let me respawn? There's like, no way I can kill one of these guys with what I have to work with. My only hope is to come over a rise and find one low on health that I can one shot with a lucky pew. That doesn't happen. I eventually just go exploring for a while, and actually found some teleporter that send me into some underground cavern. The area was really cool --albeit pretty empty, but the whole game is-- but the mobs that I did find were what I would assume are like level 30 or 40 mobs. Big black knights dual wielding 2h swords. There's no indication of levels or anything, but when I hit them it didn't hurt, and when they hit me, it hurt real bad. I respawn back at the chaos stone, and let out a heavy sigh. The wilderness bank is a good 5 or 6 minute walk away (no idea why they don't just PUT IT HERE where I'm going to rez), and I'm tired of walking there; plus there isn't any gear left in there anyway for me to wear besides. I managed to change my starting weapon to a 2h sword, though, so there's that at least.

I finally just sit down for a sec at the chaos stone while I 'rest' my HP back (spawning starts you wih like no health), and open up Firefox on my second monitor. While I'm surfing around, reading some Street Fighter article, I see someone walking up towards me. He's of the opposing faction, and looks just as naked as me! Maybe he's in the same boat, and we're both looking for a way out! I jump up, and the circle jerk begins. Run around, swing, strafe right, swing. Jump. Strafe left, swing, pull out wand, cast self heal, switch to sword, swing. Zzz. It's all rather silly, but again... we don't HAVE any real 'moves' yet. Maybe combat gets better later on, but for now it just feels like we've run out of bullets in Half-Life, and are trying to kill each other with crowbars. He wins, and I go down.

Now! Here's the big problem! I die, but where do I spawn? 3 feet away, and with like 1% health. He sees this, and runs over and one shots me. I die again, and respawn (again) 3 feet away with 1% health. He one shots me again, repeat. THIS is where I just logged out. If someone kills you at the chaos stone, you. are. totally. fucked. There is NO WAY IN HELL you can do anything, but just log out and hope he goes away. You can't switch to an alt (one character per server, and right now there's only one server), you can't even 'wait to release'. Releasing is automatic, and spawning just happens.

I don't understand why we don't rez with full HP. In WoW, you're doing a corpse run, and then 'rez' with limited health, but you can scope the area out first, make sure there are no mobs that will attack the second you rez, and you're generally safe to do so. You're still even covered from head to toe in full epics, with fully enchanted weapons in your hand. In Darkfall, you rez butt naked, with a piece of shit twig in your hand to defend yourself with, and 3 HP or so to hold you over until you can afford to 'rest' for a good two minutes to regen your health, mana, and stamina. I think the whole 'twig and soiled panties' thing should be enough of a deterrent. The laughable thing, too, is that this other guy and I were both swinging starter weapons at each other. Thank god mr Thomas wasn't at the chaos stone air guitaring and cheering like a retard each time he one shot me every 7 seconds.

Kills and deaths are recorded, and 'go on your permanent record', so this guy (don't remember his name) basically just got 4 PvP kills on me. I'm like 1 for 7 now, with that 'one' being the stupid guy I exacted my revenge on back by my faction's town.

At this point, I almost feel like rerolling is the only option left to me, unless I want to just camp the chaos stone all. day. long. hoping someone in my situation spawns with 3 HP and a pair of dirty undees, so I can cut him down and go back to town. The problem here is that sitting there waiting for god knows how many hours for some PK to die and rez at my particular chaos stone could take all night, and even then, at the end of the night, it might not happen at all.

So yeah. That's where I'm at in Darkfall right now, and it's a huge turnoff. I get the whole 'you chose this path yourself, deal with it', but there's like no way to even deal with it. What are you supposed to do in this situation? I thought being a PK was supposed to be a viable choice you could make in the world, but it just seems pretty fucked in it's current implementation. The rezzing with 3 HP if you get killed at your chaos stone is just icing on the cake. If they insist on doing that, at least make some script that realizes 'he just died 3 feet away, let's spawn him at another chaos stone 500 yards away', and put a bank at the stone, so we can at least wear shit we've saved without having to run through goblin camps to get our equipment on.

Bleh.

[continue...]

Darkfall Second Impressions

Okay. So maybe I was a *little* harsh on Darkfall last entry. In my defense, I was pretty pissed at the installation and setup of the game more than anything. At any rate, I certainly didn't suggest the devs stomp on the sourcecode with cleats, soak it in gasoline, and hurl it in a flaming blender off the White Cliffs of Dover like I did with my Warhammer Beta Review. Darkfall has a few interesting dynamics going on inside it, and with a few hours of unhindered play last night, these started to peek through the clouds at me.

Then they saw me over the hill, stormed up on me, and gang raped me.

I actually had a pretty good time playing DF last night. Saying the game is still 'slightly wonky' is putting it lightly. I really don't like the whole 'right clicking' interface design (but am getting used to it), and there's another 'you can't do that with your weapon out / you need to have your weapon out to do that' thing going on that just feels cumbersome. I also realized there's a few basic game flaws built into the UI that punish those that just don't know about them.

Case in point: When you kill someone, a gravestone appears that you loot. You have to put away your weapon, and then 'use' the gravestone to bring up the loot window. Once up, you need to manually drag each item from the corpse into your own inventory. Fine. But, if someone else and I were trying to quickly loot the same corpse, I noticed every time that by the time the window even opened for me, it would be just in time to see the last object disappearing from the bag. Turns out there's a 'fade in' graphical effect that can be accelerated thru graphical UI options, and it's labeled something archaic like "clustering UI" with a slider bar. Why you would want that particular animation to be anything other than instantaneous is a mystery.

Regarding the 'pull out your weapon / put it away' thing, I really didn't do myself any favors last night by remapping a few buttons on my mouse just as I was getting used to how it worked.

It was a simple change:

vs.

I basically just swapped my sheathe and sprint buttons, because I realized there were times when I wanted to be running and left clicking at the same time. By pressing run with my thumb, I freed up the fingers to click. Simple, but my brain is old and took a while to adjust. Totally not the game's fault, but I just don't understand why if I push the 'magic missile' button, it doesn't just pull my stupid wand out for me. NO, YOU CAN'T HEAL YOURSELF. PULL OUT YOUR STAFF FIRST. IT'S COOL, I CAN WAIT. Things like talking to an NPC give you a YOU MUST PUT YOUR WEAPON AWAY FIRST. It's annoying like in WoW when you want to take a flight, and the game doesn't just dismount you first, it demands you do it yourself, then retalk to the NPC. Dumb, but hardly limited to Darkfall.

Anyway, on to the gameplay. Now that the game just fucking loads, without giving mysterious error messages, I was able to actually get around to playing it. I did a few quests that involved killing goblins and gathering wood, and generally went about game. In the starting area for each race, you're loosely 'all on the same team'. You can kill one another, but it's generally frowned upon, and will flag you as a free kill for anyone who wants to exact revenge upon you. So everyone behaves, but the danger is still there. At any moment, someone could just decide they don't mind being flagged for a few minutes, because there's no one else around. Or you could die to AI mobs, and they just waltz over to your body and take all your shit, rather than bother to revive you or whatever. When someone dies, you have the choice to pick them back up, or basically bash their face in. These are the 'revive' and 'gank' skills, respectively. I laughed when I saw someone begging for someone to revive them in chat last night, saying they'd give someone gold for a revive. Maybe it didn't occur to them yet that once they were dead, anyone was welcome to anything they had anyway...

So you tend to have this hoarding mentality that forms early on. You run around and kill a few things, then run back to town and sell any vendor crap, and bank your gold, and maybe a spare chestpiece you got.

The starter weapons suck ass, so I felt all bold and went and bought two knives to dual weild. This was weird, because the item itself had a description describing it as being two one handed blades, but the tooltip said 2 handed weapon in red. I wasn't sure if I didn't have the proficiency to weild this item yet, or what? But I bought it anyway for 52 gold, and was pleased to see that no artificial limitations like that really exist in the game. There's no "oh, gee, I'm a paladin, I can't use a staff" crap in place. With my two new daggers, I was mowing down goblins, and feeling pretty bad ass about it. I also noticed that pretty much EVERYONE else was using the default crap starter weapons. That's a point that keeps comingup in the discusson of the game... everyone thinks 'well, if I could lose my gear at any instant then why bother using anything nice?' but the point is that those that DO bother to use anything nice stand a way better chance of not dying in the first place, and hence, not losing their nice stuff.

It's a tradeoff, and it makes you acutely aware of what you've earned thus far.

With my two knives, and a chain chest and legs that I got via questing, I headed off into the wild to find my fortune (or lose it horribly). The biggest point that I can't really stress enough is that you feel it as you walk around in the wild. The fact that I just quested for an hour or so to get some lame padded leggings and a chainmail vest, only to be acutely aware that at any second some fucker could just come over the rise and do a driveby on me... mounted combat is in the game, and someone with conceivably high enough gear could probably mow me down in one or two good whacks, fuck if it flags them or not. Who cares when they could just as easily probably chop up anyone that decided to stand by my side, not that anyone would. You also feel the same amount of excitement when you do actually kill something, check the corpse, and find new shoulderpads on them. One other kooky thing to note, though, is that much of the game takes place in first person, so you don't get to check out your new stuff really. The only way I found to actually look at my loots is to pull out my knives, which puts me in 3rd person (but still won't let me swing the camera around to look at myself fron the front), or 'rest' which has me sitting down (and does allow the camera to swivel).

When you're out in the bush, mobs aren't as liberally sprinkled around as in WoW, where leaving Ogrimmar has you confronted by 200 boars that respawn every 45 seconds. You have to actually go find shit to kill, and when you do find it, it's usually because two of them ran up behind you, one is off in the distance shooting arrows at you, and you're fucked.

There's something wonky with the sound engine, as well, as no matter how far I am from someone getting attacked, it sounds like it's happening right beside me. This freaked me the fuck out on more than one occasion. I'm lurking along in the forest, off the beaten path, birds are tweeting, and nothing sounds out of whack, when CLANG CLANG OH GOD HELP ME PEW PEW PEW --I'm convinced that 800 fuckers on pigs just found me and are killing me. I check my health; no... it's not ME dying (phew), but where the hell is that coming from? Fifty percent of the time I never even do find the source of the commotion. There's no big red nametags for people, so you have to actually pause and scan the horizon for action. Standing in a bush before ou sit down to rest is a viable tactic. WoW needs this kind of thing, like BAD. When you can spot someone's NAME a mile away, it's pretty dumb.

A related incident happened later in the evening, when I was investigating some stonehenge looking set of ruins, looking for armor chests or weapon racks (the Darkfall equivalent of finding a fel iron bound chest), and I noticed in the tree line ahead someone running around and pew pew pewing. Someone screamed out HELP ME, which means someone just died. I got curious, and edged closer, tryin to figure out if this was OMG world PvP, or just some guy biting off more than he could chew PvE-wise. Either way, he was about to leave a corpse behind which meant free lewts if I could get over there safely to check it out.

I saw some mobs running around (Dire Ghouls, or whatever) and so I chalked it up to PvE, and came out of the cover to see what was going on. Bad idea. It turns out that while yes, there were mobs involved, there was also a 5 pack of dog man dudes (the "other faction") that were raping both the mobs and my fellow faction. They saw me, and I stopped cold. They began sprinting for me, I was fucked. Turning and running isn't a very useful 'tactic', but I noticed a river nearby, and remembered how it actually had a current to it that 'swept' me along with it as I swam across it earlier. I thought maybe if I could make it to the water....

I didn't.

Gang raped by dog men, whack whack whack.

Lost my knives, new shoulderpads, and quest reward chain vest and padded leggings, BUT IT WASN'T THE END OF THE WORLD. The worst part about it was that I didn't bother to bind my hearth at either of the two towns I passed along the way, so I wound up rezzing way back at "Human Town #1" (Sandbrook). Went to my bank, grabbed the leather jerkin I had stashed there after getting my chain upgrade, bought a new set of knives, and was good to go again. I had no pants on, or fancy shoulders, but now I knew where they dropped, and set out to make my way back to the church I had found earlier with an armor rack in it, and the skeletons that dropped shoulderpads outside. I also stopped to bound my hearth at Town #3 (Copperdale) this time.

So, Darkfall...

Reading back over, you might get the impression I've fully flipped a 180, but... yeah. I'm not ashamed to eat my words, but I wouldn't call this a full 180. Maybe a 124. Lord knows my Warhammer beta reviews kept saying "this this and this sucks, and I really hope they fix that before it ships. I'd love them to make a great game, and if that's the case I'll sing its praises". Darkfall (lol, I just typed DarkHammer there) has a way to go before it's 'done'. Hearthing is performed by typing "slash bindstone underscore recall" (/bindstone_recall). You form groups by clicking on someone and typing "/formgroup". Opening the quest log takes a good 15 seconds between when you see the window open, and there's actually any text in it. It looks like it just timed out, or isn't working at all, then the 'journal page' loads, slooowly. It's like an actual website, in the game, and feels like it's loading on a 28.8 modem. These examples can't be the intended way of going about things.

But the tension you feel when you're battling a goblin, and another fucker comes over the ridge and starts plinking arrows at you (Aw shit, do I run? Can I take this?), just isn't really there in WoW. When the worst case sceanrio in WoW is a corpserun, and you know you're gonna die, you just try and run towards the graveyard to cut that corpserun down by 10 seconds. GG. When you know you're going to die in Darkfall, there's nothing you can do but hope that no one sees you die (or hears the 1 mile radius HELP ME GAHGRHAHLGH...), and hope you can make it back to your gravestone unmolested to recover your stuff. There's also tense, on-the-fly decision making where you need to decide while you still have like 60% health if you think you can finish this out, or should you make a break for it now.

That feeling alone is worth giving Darkfall a try. Being uncomfortable about dying is ... well, it's rare. When I play COD4or whatever, I take risks, and run out in the open dumping clips at people, only to get mowed down Gallipoli style. If I die it isn't a big deal. When I see a mob in Darkfall, I scan the area, check for possible adds, double check that I have arrows loaded up in my character sheet, and then go for it, all while fully aware that if I finish the fight with 10% health, I'm basically painting a bullseye on my face.

So, yes. I stand corrected.

Darkfall has redeeming qualities, but I also stand by the fact that there's still an awful lot of muck covering them up. As the game progresses, it can only get better. Patches can implement better load times for the quest log, and at this point it still feels like a beta. Whether you feel like paying 52 bucks for said beta is up in the air. I might not have bought it if offered a 7 day trial or something. I feel like this blog is pretty important to me, though, and the people that read it value my take on stuff like this, so I'm happy to take one for the team. Perhaps even more importantly: If I have any interest in making stuff like this for a living (and I do), I owe it to myself to shop around and see what's out there.

The problem is that I just keep coming back to how awesome it would be if WoW was licensable like the Unreal engine, and the Darkfall team had made a WoW mod based on this premise. Full looting of corpses, the need to drag and drop items from corpses to your own bags one at a time. Even the need to sheathe your weapon before doing so isn't BAD, it's just poorly implemented in Darkfall. Remove the entire BoP / BoE aspect on equipment. You could even keep the PvE game instanced... Go run SFK for some blues, but if someone tags you by the Sepulcher, they can loot all that shit off you. Make the bank have an actual purpose instead of just being 'that one big bag you can't carry around'. Remove nameplates, and blur faction lines. Orc on orc ganking should be an option, even if frowned on. Some mechanics would obviously need to be tuned... stealth shouldn't be AS stealthy as it is now, or casters would just be fucked by rogues. I also like the idea that in Darkfall there ARE no classes, or even levels. You just skill up abilities as you use them, and a mage could train kidney shot after enough melee practice eventually. There's no magical bullshit reason why I can't put this breastplate that I just found on my character right now.

THAT will be the next big thing. When all of this comes together in one big package. It wouldn't need to be on every server, but having WoW "Darkfall" servers would be awesome. I just think the WoW combat engine (and art style) are top tier, and the Darkfall design team would be better served just designing, instead of mucking around with a wonky UI and clunky animations.


side note: sorry for the lack of purty pictures to look at. I like breaking up walls of text with them, but I can't access Darkfall from school (confirmed it's the school firewall, and not Vista), and the pictures I took last night at home are trapped on my system there until I get home. Will probably put little pictures in here of my fancy (now gone) shoulderpads etc when I get home. It isn't helped that the Darkfall 'screenshot' button doesn't work, and that I need to Alt-Printscreen and paste into Photoshop to get one at all.

[continue...]

Dark Fail?

Hooboy. Darkfall. This is a first first first impressions thing, which could change drastically as I spend more time with the game. But right now, as it stands, I'm pretty underwhelmed. It probably isn't helped by the fact that the game refused to even let me in for a good 12 hours or so, but when I finally DID get in last night (around midnight, I usually go to bed at 10:30), what I found wasn't really that impressive.

Let's start with the "not getting in part", because maybe I'm just pissed at the game in general at this point, and looking for reasons to hate it. I woke up at 1am on a work night a few days back to grab my copy. It seriously feels like they don't WANT people to buy this game. I'm not sure why they don't just open orders, and then fill them out in a queue, but for some reason, the "store" where you buy Darkfall is only open for one hour per day, and what would usually be 4am for me (7pm GMT). That it happened to be 4pm on that particular day was kind of a fluke, and allowed me to actually buy the game.

Again, though, they don't want you to buy it. There are NO links to this "store" on the front page of their website, and I only happened to find a link to it in some random ass forum post by someone trolling. You apparently go to this page here, and make another account, separate from the forum system. Then you can enter your credit card info ahead of time (which I did) to avoid having to enter it during the stampede when the store is open and everyone is spamming F5 on the transaction page. Then you check the forums, and look for dev posts saying "yeah the store will be open for 13 minutes today starting at 7pm GMT". People are even joking that BUYING Darkfall is fucking hardcore!

Whatever. I got my copy.

After you complete the purchase you're directed to a webpage where you DL a torrent file that sets up the full client download. The client is 8.6 GB, so yeah. I get that. Blizzard caught all kinds of internet hell when they switched their patching system from direct downloads to a torrent system until some blue came on and basically did the math to show the amount of bandwidth required, plus user install base, plus shut the fuck and just deal with it. Everyone calmed down, and that's just the way it works now. I can dig it. Set the torrent up to DL at like 1:15am that same night, and went back to sleep. My laptop was the machine getting it, since the next day at school I had ONE 45 minute lesson in an 8 hour day ahead of me (we're getting near graduation, and English is the first 'elective' to get the axe when they need to make room in the day's schedule to practice). Figured I could dick around in Darkfall to pass the time. Got to school with the torrent at like 90%, and finally it finished around 9:30 or so. It wouldn't connect to the lobby, though, and needed a patch. Okay. 126MB, direct DL from Aventurine. Everything seems to be going okay, whatever.

Once patched, the little login window refuses to connect ALL DAY LONG, though. I eventually just gave up around 2pm at school, and just figured maybe it was the firewall system here at school or something...?

Got home, copied the install folder across the LAN to my server, and began installing the game on my main rig. Okay, did the lobby patch, and we're making progress. Now I can actually log in, and it wants to patch the game files themselves. Okay, this is no surprise. It's an MMO. That patch (388 MB) begins to DL, and I see it trucking along at a whopping:

..ugh. Whatever. It's gonna take a while to DL. I try and not stare at the progress bar. I have ridiculously fast internet here in Japan, so that's not really it. I can only imagine a little Pentium III 800 file server hooked up to some DSL line in a closet at Aventurine trying its hardest to serve the rabid masses. Whateverrrrrr.....

Ok! So I finally get patched! I'm ready to log in! I launch the client!

Orly? Creating java VMs, are we? What is this, Puzzle Pirates? I thought I was trying to play Kill Rape Darkfall, not some PopCap Bejeweled clone? Okay. So! Not enough memory. Let's see. I got 2GB of RAM, a video card with 768 MB of memory on it, and over 2TB of hard drive space. Hmm. Well, let's jump on Google, and punch in that error code.

Hmmm, here's a thread on Sun's site...

You don't have enough contigous virtual address space to reserve the desired heap size; that size is pecified via the -Xmx argument to the JVM, and it should exist in one of the server configuration files. However, I don't know which, so check your server's docs, and then change it to something like -Xmx512m as a starting value, and then play with it to see what's the max you can get (depends on your OS).

Uh. Okay. So I actually dig around in my java conf files and find out where to edit this value, retry, nothing. Same error. I dig around some more, reinstall Java. Update my .net frameworks, as that was suggested in some other thread. Blah Blah Blah. It's getting to be around 10pm at this point. I've been trying to get in for around 12 hours now.

I go crawling back to google, and find some random page in Japanese, that's describing the same error, and contains the word "Darkfall" to boot! Japanese folks troubleshooting Darkfall Java VM errors? Hmm, the plot thickens... but I have a secret weapon for just this occasion!

Honey! Can you come in here and tell me what this stupid website says? I can't read the kanji!

Hmm...

"It says... open control panel, and... set... like language? your area? to ... like America? Britain? something English... I dunno so much about computers, gomen nasai yo... "

Set my control panel to English? Like... my region settings? But it says something about Java, right?

Wakaranai, yo... gomen... (I dunno, sorry)

Hmm...


Sure, why the hell not, right? Lol.

So I go into my regional settings, and set "ENGRISH!" as my default language. I live in Japan, and have a Japanese keyboard. Most of the time, I'm typing in English anyway, but my keyboard layout is Japanese. I have a 109-key keyboard that has extra buttons to switch to kanji input or whatever. Also, hitting something like "Shift 2" gives me the double quotation marks (") instead of an American keyboard having the "@" symbol there. So if I tell my computer I have an English keyboard, it makes typing a huge pain in the ass, since things like "\" and "$" and ">" and "[" are all jumbled around.

BUT!

Apparently it will make Darkfall fucking launch! Are you fucking kidding me?! WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH HAVING MEMORY AT ALL? ...JAVA VM?! YOU NEED MY SHIFT-TWO TO BE AN "@" SYMBOL? WOW.... fucking ridiculous.

I'm FINALLY able to see the game window launch, like for real. The window pops up, and it's trying to give me a loading screen, but instead my screen flickers black and red, and then just shits itself. Everything goes all wonky big, and my mouse cursor is fucking huge. Apparently my nvidia driver just died a horrible death, and windows is running in like 640x480 on my 22 inch monitor and really wants to restart, but I can't even see my start menu or anything, so I just hit the reset button on the front of my system. This happens three or four times, even after updating my nvidia drivers, and I finally decide to give up running it in full screen on my main (i have two) monitor. I run it windowed, and OH MY FUCKING CHRIST, YOU MEAN I CAN REALLY MAKE A CHARACTER NOW? REALLY?

Ugh.

Ixo Belle gets made, and off I go into Darkfall!

Wow! I'm finally in the game, and these flowers on the ground are ugly as fuck! And what's with the Lego blocks passing for shadows? You're kidding, right? I fiddle with the graphics settings a bit, crank up anti aliasing, and everything finally calms down and I'm doing well enough to FINALLY run around town for a few minutes. The control scheme takes some real getting used to. Right clicking opens "UI" mode, where your character stops moving, and your cursor becomes active. This is where you can view your character page, adjust your settings, rebind keys, move windows around, whatever. Right click again goes to 'walk around mode' where you actually steer and walk. Trying to right click and strafe puts you (surprise!) back into cursor mode. OMG it's already 11:30, and I'm staying awake for this? Gah. Let's rebind that key to something out of the way... Like Num-Pad Decimal, which I have bound on my Nostromo to be accessible, but not right fucking click. Okay, that works... oh wait... no it doesn't. I can hit it once to enter UI mode, but hitting it again decides I'm trying to type "......." to the world around me. Ok, fine. You win. It's right click. Whatever.

I run around the countryside for a bit, and actually start to shake the drama of the fiasco I spent trying to get in the game at all. The world isn't half bad. There's stuff in the distance I can see that looks interesting, but I feel like running over there is asking for it. The world is harsh and scary! I better be careful, etc etc.

I run around for a good five minutes (You gain proficiency in Running!) before I come across my first 'mob'. It's a Dire Spider, and there's zero indication of whether it's a good 'first mob' or some hyper elite level 80 death awaiting me. So I run over and hit it. Yeah, not level 80 death, but probably about level 8 or so. I'm still effectively level one. It's a losing struggle, so I run away (You gain proficiency in Running!). It follows me. Like, forever. I die. Ok. That actually isn't so bad, because I have nothing to lose yet, and it's actually kind of cool realizing that my character's body gets all bloody as the fight wears on.

Back at the spawn point, I respawn (still bloody), and need to rest to regain my lost health (You gain proficiency in Resting!). This takes a good 1 or 2 minutes. I never played EQ, but I'm thinking of how people said after you cast spells you needed to sit down and stare at some book interface to regen mana. This feels like that, BUT(!), I won't dismiss it out of hand, as I essentially have no food, and in terms of WoW, am basically regenning based on spirit alone. Whatever.

I run around some more, and find another player that looks to be a beginner as well. He has a weapon in one hand, and is otherwise naked, just like me. I take a swing on him. Full PvP, right? Oh jeez. Now I've flagged myself as "rogue" and suddenly people in full suits of armor are running up to me out of the blue and bashing my face in with huge maces. This time, as I "die" I lay on the ground for 60 seconds squirming about, shouting HELP ME or whatever. I've heard of this. This is the moment where someone can 'help you up' or 'gank' you (the key bind is actually called the 'gank skill'). The guy with this oversized mallet seems to be doing neither, and I can imagine him somewhere in a dimly lit apartment, just savoring his leet PvP skillz as he stands over my helpless body. Perhaps he has a boner? This goes by for about 40 seconds, and I really just want to 'release' and get on with the 1 minute of healing. He finally winds up some big swing (whose animation misses me completely), and I hear some 'glurp' noise that I assume is supposed to be the sound of my head being flattened. The screen goes red and I scream as I die. Ok. I rez again, wait a minute to regen. Go off in another direction, across a river (You gain proficiency in Swimming!). A broadcast is sent that the server is coming down in 30 minutes for maintenance.

I come across a graveyard full of goblins, and everyone going nuts basically farming them. I join the fray. Killing a goblin leaves a tombstone, and everyone is scrambling to click the stone and loot the crap. I get a better sword off one, and a shield off another. I realize it's better to just leave your sword tucked away (it needs to be sheathed to loot, which takes about a GCD), let someone else kill them, then ninja their shit. It all feels very silly, and finally I just want to swing my sword a bit to skill up my combat proficiency. I swing wide, hit another player, and proceed to get raped again. Hoo boy.

Head off in another direction. The server is going down in ten minutes now, and that's fine with me. It will give me a sense of closure to play until it goes down for the night's maintenance. I manage to find a goblin off in the distance, away from everyone else. I kill it, and have the full loot to myself. I get a bow, some arrows, 5 gold, and another shield. I log for the night. It's 12:35am.

I don't have screenshots of the fray, or the shadow quality I mentioned. I can get some up when I get home tonight, since now I'm back at work, and the game won't connect again. I think it has to do with my laptop running Vista? I've tried connecting through the Vidalia network using Tor and Sockscap32 just to make sure it isn't the firewall or anything kooky on the school network, but everything else here works just fine. WoW, Steam, FTP, www... the firewall here seems to be wide open. It's a mystery.

I'm pretty unimpressed with combat in general, but I only have the ability to swing horizontally or vertically at this point. As I skill up and gain spells or abilities this will probably change. I recognize that. For now, though, I pull out my sword, and play circle-strafe-jerk with whatever I'm fighting, while just spamming left click to swing. It isn't very compelling. The interface and movement system takes getting used to. I can appreciate that. Once it sinks in, and becomes second nature, maybe it won't feel so intrusive when I right click and stop running, and my cursor becomes active. For now it just seems like a wonky setup. Like EVE's control system, but we aren't piloting frigates in space. We're running around with swords. I know they're trying to make it so you can't run in one direction while looking in another, but I do that every day in real life. They should make the right click look mechanic work your neck... like, you can't look 180 degrees behind you, but why should I be constrained to only look dead center ahead of me? Did I get in a nasty car accident? Do I have whiplash? Hitting Esc should bring up the interface that right clicking does now... it just seems weird.

Anyway. That's my first impression, and I realize that 70% of this column is how pissed I was that it didn't just launch after downloading it. But that was my first impression. I bought the game, I expect to be able to get in without getting some retarded errors about Java VM that have to do with my fucking keyboard layout. That just makes no sense, and if I hadn't stumbled across that random Japanese page (and had a Japanese wife to read it to me) I'd probably STILL be dicking around with Java Heap Size Allocation or some shit. For all I know, the reason my laptop won't connect and patch is because I keep my fly zipped up, or I didn't shave this morning.

I'll give it another go tonight when I get home, and maybe some time this weekend, but yeah... not sure if this is the game for me. As I read more stuff on it now, after having seen it live, I keep getting the feeling that people are trying to "justify" it, instead of actually praising it. People don't like WoW. I get it. People want diversity in the MMO market. I feel ya. It was the same thing with Warhammer. People want something new, but Warhammer just isn't as good a game as WoW. The dungeons in Warhammer were pathetic. Yes, it has some PvP / RvR, but even that aspect (which I fully gave a chance) just wasn't very good.

People are doing the same for Darkfall. It has this PvP system in place, but the game itself just feels... sub par. Maybe as I get further into it, these problems will fall away, to reveal an honest to god fun experience underneath. Or maybe it will just suck, and I'll shrug and 'meh' as I uninstall it. I think 'the idea' of Darkfall is an interesting one. Full looting. A complete lack of security or bound items. Those are points that deserve merit. But if the game itself just sucks, then I'll happily wait for another company to come along and 'do it right' rather than suffer through a poor implementation.

I'll give it more time. We'll see.

[continue...]

I'm Gonna Try to Get Darkfall Tonight

Yeah. Wish me luck on that. I think the "store" opens at 1am for me here in Japan. Considering I've suffered through god knows how many other MMOs that I just gave up on, this can't be any worse. I mean, the Age of Conan box mocks me regularly from the shelf every time I look at it.

Keen's reviews of it over the last few days actually make it sound interesting, and he apparently has a guild up and running or something. Who knows? Maybe it'll be 'neat'.

I honestly won't lose sleep over it (well, past staying up to 1 to try and get it), but maybe I'll have something interesting to say about it in the next few days. Maybe I'll try and think of clever names for my toon tonight. I think rolling an 'ixobelle' is just asking for punishment. Maybe "xXx Niggerbelle Faggotslayzorz xXx", or "CockSlut VanCarebear McDickchoker"...?

Maybe an old classic, keeping it simple... something like "Adolph Oliver Nipples". Lemme know what you guys think. : /

[continue...]

Got a New Guild

Joined up with a Naxx 25 PUG this weekend, and went on my priest. They needed heals, and I figured a trial by fire was the way to go for me. I'd healed a few 5 mans, and a heroic or two, but usually with people that would be pretty forgiving if they died or I screwed up. This isn't my first raid healer (resto druid), but I've gotten pretty serious about playing the priest, and don't even log the warlock much but for occasional Titansteel cooldowns, so I figured it was time to see how this whole 'priest raiding' thing would play out with it. Got Clique and Grid lined up to where I thought I could handle it, flasked up to compensate for some less-than-stellar gear, and dove straight in. It went really well, actually, and the core guild that was running the PUG (not a full PUG) seemed like a cool group of cats, so I took a ginvite mid run.

Conjunction Junction (I didn't choose the guild name, and never do) will be my new 'team' on Cho'gall. The biggest thing, in my own mind, is that the vibe on vent semed just right for my own frameset while I raid (joking around, but knuckling down when needed), and that I didn't need to write some fucking essay or poem about how much raiding experience I have to get the invite. I guess that's two things. Whatever. I honestly was starting to miss being part of a bigger picture, and the fact that the entire Guild Application Process took 2 tells felt about right.

Plus my priest got about 4 or 5 items in the course of one run, but on many items I was the only one rolling. Checking the armory link to the right for my priest now, I'm doing pretty good, I think. I think the GM appreciated that I even offered to keep that loot 'in the guild' by joining, and the skeleton guild I was in before was already pretty well in the ground, so yeah...

Compare that to the 10 man PUG I was in on Friday night, where the boomkin was bitching at me for rolling on (and winning) a dagger that dropped. Apparently crit is useless for Disc priests, because Divine Aegis procs go by your horoscope for the day, and he kept insisting that haste wasn't a healing stat. Um, Flash Heal? Greater Heal while Penance cools down? Prayer of Healing? Binding Heal? Are these all instants?. This is the same druid that didn't bring any reagents for Rebirth or GotW... and do druids even use daggers, or was he complaining just to complain? Because, you know... that's what you do in a PUG. This is the SAME druid that later in the run rolled on (and won) the Sheet Lightning headpiece, and when pointed out by the warrior ML that it was cloth replied with "and? stats are stats". Oh you'll get yours, my friend, just wait and see...

But yeah. I'm glad to be out of the LFG channel for a change. This was further cemented by the fact that the guild doesn't really care if you DO run PUGs (the guild is still too small to fill out raids alone), and the 'training run' of Malygos that followed the Naxx run. Not many had been in there before, and the GM just wanted to get people used to how the phases worked, and how the whole fight went down. I myself had never even set foot in EoE yet, but was pleasantly surprised to find people left on the planet that realize there needs to be a first time for everything.

We wiped, and it was hard. Never did down him, but had a few good attempts. With that knowledge under my belt, though, I was able to jump in a different 10 man EoE pug later in the weekend on my t7 lock and bang it out in three tries. So grats me on two counts. Or three.

Or something.

Whatever.

[continue...]