The problem:  The Official Forums are so over moderated, that it’s most likely suppressed many fundamentally important ideas that could have moved the game out of it’s 1999 thought process, and most likely cost them 1000s of accounts due to alienating customers.

Remember problem 5? “The Last Straw” ?  The other day, someone decided to post the question on the offical forums:

GrunEQ wrote: I have been killing Enslaved Warboars for a very long time.  I have sent /feedback and /bug report, but still there has been no key drops from them to advance the quest.  Is it broken?  Also tried other boars just in case, but still no drops.  This is for the quest The Last Straw.

Well, you and I both know it’s broken.  Some nutbag was responding to the guy saying, “Dude, just kill more stuff! You are killing the wrong things and you suck” basically.  I decided to step up and post a copy of my correspondence with the GM’s, so this guy’s stupid misinformation would stop being spread.  I wanted them to see the hopeful response that GM Blassreitergave me, that said that he’d attempt to open a new line of communication with the devs.  You can view the post here, if you’d like.

Nearly a day later, I get this message sent to me in my mail box:

Tsunai the forum moderator wrote: Your post (quoted below) to the thread titled “The Last Straw” has been removed. Dialog between you and CS is considered private material and therefore quoting this dialog (especially with the inclusion of names) is against the Forum Rules. If you would like to post a summary of your dialog without names, that would be acceptable but we cannot allow direct quoting of private discussions.

Hey, Tsunai, was our conversation right here considered private too?  Guess I fucked that up too, right? For the record, my post was simply my conversation with the GMs, I don’t consider them private at all.  Don’t say anything to me as Customer Service if you can’t back your shit up. Instead of going into a diatribe about everything wrong with this, I’m going to include my response to his moderation, which will explain a lot of my feelings:

Hey there, Tsunai.

I just wanted to talk to you a minute, about the post of mine you removed.  Certainly, you probably get responses in a similar frame to this, and, for all I know you completely ignore them.  But I’ll humor myself and send you a message.

There is probably something in some TOS for the forums, or TOS in the game, prohibiting me from relating customer service emails on your forums, I’m guessing, right?  I can ‘maybe’ understand that. You probably had one bad apple, posting is, “GM TeddyRuxpin is ghay and banned me, wtf?! Read what he said here!” I guess, the best thing to do to moderate that kind of thing, is moderate everyone.

However, in my situation, I simply posted a response to a thread, that I had already spoken to the gm’s about.  My post showed GM Blassreiter in a good light, and made it seem possible that this quest would be worked on fairly soon, and fixed.  My message was something hopeful, and it brought something to the questing community, about a specific issue many of us have had.

If anything, I showed to the customer base, that the GM’s listened to our problems, and the dialogue brought nothing but positive feedback for you.  However, now all you have done is instill a deep distrust in me.  I’m sure you read my post (Atleast, I hope you did.) I’ve left this game for years, and just recently returned.  I have no desire to be in a community that I feel is over moderated and overhanded with it’s customers.  I’m not sure if you’re a volunteer staff, or not, if you are not, then I would hope my subscription means something to you.

My other question is, what is wrong with posting their fake GM handles?  It’s not like I posted their real name’s and addresses.  No one knows who GM TeddyRuxpin is, and it’s just a silly standard from past MMOs and Muds to have wonky non-existent names, whereas every other customer service entity works with a first name.  I’m sure there is a policy against it, somewhere, with me breathing out a GM’s name, but why? Why do you think that exists?  Am I not allowed to attribute anyone’s word’s with an actual person? 

Also, another thought.  Could I post my correspondence on my own blog, and just link to it and say something like, “Well, I talked to a GM and they said they would open some new communication with the developers, read about it - here.” ?  I don’t see why anyone would take my word for it, because I could spout that in every thread, atleast with a transcription of my dialogue, people could see that I was probably telling the truth.

 

I’m going to leave this with just one last thought I touched on.  Moderating is a fine thing when it blocks things that disrupt the community.  When we let the rules drag us all down, the helpful, etc.  You only stand to alienate everyone as a whole.  My infatuation with EQ2 isn’t so much that I couldn’t drop it at a flip of a coin, especially when I feel I’ve been wronged.

 

Thanks

Relon/Rookerith (BTW, if you transcribe this message to anyone else, feel free to include my names over there, they’re fake, don’t include any personal information, and what the hell, you know?)

I didn’t bother waiting for him to respond.  He wont.  I can only blame the 13 year olds sending pictures of penis to forum moderators the world over, every time they get banned.  See, forum moderators generally have God complexes, they remove posts without a second thought, and never listen to any objection to their behavior.  Good forum moderators don’t last, because they’re objective, and too caring to face the onslaught of idiocy.  It’s only the battle worn ones that simply see things in black and white, with no chance of a crisis on conscious that make it for any length of tenure.  These moderators don’t have time to read return messages…well, they might, just to see if any other TOS has been broken in the containing message. You go Tsunai!

Solution:I think Tsunai needs to get laid.  Maybe his power mongering “Oh oh, they broke the rules, fapfapfap!” spree would end.  My post didn’t need to be deleted, unless they’re allergic to my 15 dollars a month.  They did do one thing, they stopped me from posting on the official forums. Kudos!  You really want to get eq2flames.com to be the number 1 EQ2 forums out there, don’t you?  Oh wait, they already are?  How did that happen? Oh, right..you guys over moderate your forums!  *facepalm*

Problem: “The Last Straw” fantastic name really; who knows, it might be my last one too.  Anyhow, it’s a quest, that near the end of your tasks, ask you to find a key. Fun part about that? It hasn’t dropped from the mob it used to drop from, about 6 months ago.  It’s a quest that has been broken for literally half a year.  It’s in the 30-40 level range.  A range that new customers quickly get to, and you have a broken quest? Not good.

I did send a message to the GM’s (as I’ve started doing) and this is my response:

Hello Relon!

Thank you for contacting Sony Online Entertainment’s In-Game Support, this is GM Aphobiance. I understand you are having troubles progressing The Last Straw and would like some assistance in this matter. This issue has been reported and is being looked into at this time. Unfortunately with all of the new content and games coming out older content can be overlooked at times. Unforutnately I can not give you an ETA on when this will be addressed. You may want to check our forums for any possible updates on this matter in the future. I wish you the best of luck in and out of game!

If you have any other issues we can assist you with, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Safe travels,

GM Aphobiance
Sony Online Entertainment LLC

Alright, so basically this is what we learned from GM Aphobiance:

• Our best bet to find out if problems are fixed is reading their forums.
• It’s been reported before, they know about it, they just haven’t fixed it.
• They’re ‘overlooking’ it because they’d rather work on new content.  It’s fairly apparently they’re short staffed on developers that have the skillset to fix quests like these for whatever reason, and they’re working on the high end content, lowbies be damned, right?
• Aphobiance enjoys telling us how unfortunately things are. Sometimes he likes to tell us how Unforutnately, which is funny, because you’d assume with how many times he informs customers of their unfortunate situation, he’d get the spelling right everytime.
• He’s willing to assist us with other questions, which is good, because we really got far here.

Now, I decided to respond again, because they closed my ticket down, like they had done an awesome job and it was time to hit the bar and order a round of beer for everyone, because Rookerith’s problem was a slum dunk win! No, no you guys didn’t.  You kinda just brushed me off and said you didn’t care about my problem:

Well, this is marked solved, but I’m going to respond to it in any event, in hopes that you atleast read it, Aphobiance.

I’m a returning player, having not played in years. I’m enjoying myself, but the first thing I see, is your older content. People working up new characters see your older content, new players see your older content. I’m of the mind that things shouldn’t be broken for months, especially older things, this isn’t the impression you want to give to newer players leveling up, and the frustration of the amount of quests I’ve seen that are broken or misleading as I level up just shouldn’t be here.

I understand that you have to work on expansions and whatnot to keep retention at the high end, but you seriously need to work on your older content, if you want to keep new players from quitting due to frustration, because new subscriptions, or returning players just don’t care about the high end content, they care about your old content that has magically stopped working.

In an attempt to smooth me over, they must have sent my ticket to Level 2 GM, the one that doesn’t outright say, “Low end content, lol, we don’t work on that anymore.” Anyhow, for what it’s worth, he atleast pressed my buttons right and gave a bit of hope:

Greetings Relon,

This is GM Blassreiter. I understand your frustration over this issue, and after further review I see that quite a few players are having trouble with this quest. I have opened a new line of communication with our Development team, and I am urging them to fix this issue with all due haste as it seems that players are being hindered from completing the quest normally. I apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this issue has caused you, and I thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to resolve this issue, however, like GM Aphobiance said, we do not have a timeframe on when this issue will be addressed. If you have any other issues please do not hesitate to contact us again and the first available GM will be happy to assist you.

-GM Blassreiter
Customer Service
Sony Online Entertainment

For the record, I like what Blassreiter said.  He made it sound like they were actually going to work on it, instead of the, what I’ve learned normal response of GM’s is of, “LOL, Go check the forums someday maybe it’ll say we fixed it!” 

Solution: Well, damn, obviously fix it.  Get the key to drop again.  For what it’s worth, GM Blassreiter said the right things, even if nothing happened, and made me, as a customer happy.  That being said, this shit has been broken for a long time, there really is no excuse. How do things like this even get broken? Good lord.

The problem:There is a quest called “The Kragbak Strongox“, 3 of the 4 monsters needed for it is stupid rare.

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/The_Kragbak_Strongbox

Alright.  So you get this quest from a Kragbak Gnoll item drop in Kaladim (Kaladim is another one of those pesky shared group dungeons, where other groups can run around and steal your mobs/bosses).   Any of the damn gnolls can drop it.  It’s called A Kragbak Ringlet;  it’s a piece of the gnoll’s chest that you find on top a cliff in the same dungeon.  After searching the chest you find that you need 4 more ringlets from rather rare Kragbaks.

One of the ringlets is held by a rare “champion” Kragbak from the arena ring event.  I guess I should explain ring events really quick, so you can realize how utterly gay this is.

A ring event is something, where you kill the first wave, and a second wave appears, etc.  After all the waves, the ring event is out of commission for a specific period of time before it “Respawns“.   The reason it’s gay, is, it’s in a public dungeon.  If another group beats you to it, congrats! You gotta wait until it respawns for you to get a go at it.  Especially when you need some type of rare spawn from these ring events for a quest..guess what, that’s exactly our problem! 

For the arena:

• First wave is a wave of generic spectators.
• Second, you fight a wave of generic mobs fighting in the arena.
• Third wave is one of three arena champions.
• Fourth wave is some stupid gnome that shouldn’t even be a wave, and got lost on his way to gnome academy or something.

The problem here is we need a specific arena champion during the third wave named “The Claw”.  There is some rumors that killing the spectators in a different order will spawn a different champion.  I don’t buy it.  See, the problem with EQ2 is, not many people bother playing it, so there is a real lack of information out there.  From what I’ve seen it’s just random which champion you get.  There appears to be a goblin, a bugbear and a kragbak champion.  You need the Kragbak (The Claw!) one.  We were rather lucky, in my group, and got it on our second try. (First try was the bugbear).

Here’s the kicker though…  These Kaladim ring events despawn for 2 hours after completion, so people don’t farm them.  Since this is a shared dungeon, someone else might have already done it.  Based on a long night of 5ish hours playing, you’re only going to get one or two shots at this part of the quest, assuming another group doesn’t beat you to it, and only a 33% each time to get the right Champion.

This isn’t difficult, this didn’t make the quest hard.  See, EQ2 has this shitty idea, instead of making complicated or difficult or memorable fights, that just make specific monsters retardedly rare, and consider that fun for the players. The challenge is getting it to respawn and seeing if the dice roll you up the right monster.  It’s called “Place holders” or PHs, and whoever came up with the idea, congrats!  Whoever continues to roll the idea out after WoW showed us it was a shitty idea, and instances are far far better, where the mobs you need for quests are always up, you can go to hell.

—

Two of the other mobs you need are a part of another ring event, the Kragbak “Cliff” ring event in the same dungeon. In this one, you clear multiple cliffs of Kragbaks.  Again, this is another 2 hour respawn marathon, and one of the bosses is really rare. One spawns on the first wave, the other spawns on the third and final wave.  On EQ’s offical forums we hear these quotes:

Drazala writes: The channel lord is part of the cliff ring event and is an uncommon spawn. When he is up, he spawns up on the top cliff by the chest.

Rakk writes :The channel lord is part of the cliff event, he spawns up on one of the cliffs (where the chest is). I saw the Reverend about 3 or 4 times before I saw the channel lord - his name is not capitalised cos he is not a named and is either called ‘a kragbak channel lord’ or just ‘a channel lord’ - I really cant remember. I think I musta done the cliff event about 10-15 times before I got the channel lord. Note I’m guessing at how often I did it, I did it for a few days, and it was boring so it all kinda blurred into one hideously long ring event for me

Alright Raak.  I’ve cleared the cliffs 3 to 4 times now…trying everyday when I get home.  By your numbers, if I decided to sit there and get it at each respawn, I’d be spending 20-30 hours, to get some rare spawn monster for a quest. 

Solution:Look, SoE.  I get it, you have some narcissistic love for creating quests that are puzzling, unitutive, and generally face-slapping for players.  You enjoy quests that aren’t accessible, and make people want to cry in frustration.  You enjoy the satisfaction you get when you see a quest in a quest log for months.  I wouldn’t put it past you all to have a stat tracker, to track how long quests are in quest logs so you can throw a goddamn party for whoever created the longest quest to complete on average that quarter.  Well, instead of throwing that goddamn party, maybe you should use that tracker, and see which quests never get completed because of some asinine rare spawning monster, and up the spawn count, so people can actually do the quest.  Stop making quests difficult by making PH/rare mobs a part of it.  That is not a difficult encounter.  Learn to make an MMO right, goddamn. 

The Problem:  “Silver Wares” it’s a quest.  It’s in a zone that is not solo.  It’s designed for ‘probably’ 3+.   You can kinda duo it, most would probably take a full 6 man group to handle the place, as the respawn rate is INSANE.  Even though you could fight through it with fewer numbers, as you weave and bob through the different rooms, respawns will eventually spawn on you unless you are fast enough, and a duo usually isn’t fast enough.

This brings us to Silver Wares.

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Silver_Wares

It’s a quest, to pick up 3 knives from these tables in the dungeon, so they have something to fight the werewolves with.  Cool! The werewolf hunters didn’t bring silver weapons, how funny! So we have to find them weapons in the dungeon with the werewolves!

However, when you pick up the knife, it disappears, and has to respawn..but..it doesn’t respawn..20 minutes later, it still has not respawned.  My group and I gave up waiting.  This morning, I look up the quest on Allakhzam.  From the allakhazam article, we see these comments:

Gardengnome writes:The respawn is definately upwards of two hours. Grabbed one and waited for the next one to spawn for a friend and no sign of another spawn and we’ve been waiting for over two hours now. Kinda long respawn imo…

NapFloridian responds:Yeah this is confirmed. It takes days for these silver spoons to respawn. I am waiting now for 3 days for two of my guildmates and me to get the 2 last DINGS. Should be reported as a gamebreak…. Insane Thanks Sony

Really?  You have a quest in a dungeon, that requires a group of people to successfully soldier through.  A dungeon that you may bring upwards of 5 other people with you to. A SHARED dungeon, that can have multiple other groups in there, beating you to the silverware knives.  Who the hell makes such a shitty quest and thinks it’s fun to only allow one person a day to finish a quest in an area that will ultimately have many, many people wandering through it.

Solution: Fix the respawn rate, or don’t make it disappear in the first place.  This isn’t a release dungeon, this was the third f’in’ expansion.  You should have realized by now that people don’t enjoy this crap.  People leave your game in frustration because of this crap.  Make your game fun, instead of punishing us for playing it.

Read Rao’s blog post for what should easily be identified as a “problem”

http://raoworld.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/the-lost-art-of-reading-comprehension/

One line to sum this up:  Broken links in the knowledge base.

Here are a couple choice quotes:

On to the knowledge base I went. After a few minutes there, I found another link to the e-mail support forums.  I clicked that and got a broken link.  Foiled again.

And:

I did some more searching but I didn’t find any answers to that question.  I figured the safest way would be to explain what I was trying to do and request directions.

I wrote:
“Dear Sony.  I would like to request a character transfer for one of my characters.  As the automated website is still down, I would like to request a manual transfer.  I searched the message boards and the knowledge base, but I was unable to find out if I am supposed to include all the information in the initial request or if you will send me a form to be filled out.  Please inform me of which avenue I am supposed to take.

Thank you for your assistance.”

I submitted the request comfortable that I would at least find out what I was supposed to do.

Today, I received this response:
“Dear SOE Customer,

Your request for a character transfer has been denied due to insufficient information.”

So, here’s the jist of all this.  Sony’s Knowledgebase is out of date, with broken links.

You simply cannot have out of date information/broken information/etc when people go to your knowledgebase for information.  You expect it to be up to date, and not raise more questions that it answers. 

Before you fix anything even in your game, that Knowledgebase should be the Holy friggin bible of accuracy.  Fix it SoE.

Holy Crap, do we even use this anymore?

*scratches his head* I had half of a review for 99 Nights written, and haven’t finished it..I really should. I’m sorry guys, I just took a slight break from 360, and started playing EQ2 a bit with the women.

It’s enjoyable to a degree, because it’s “new”.  It’s got enough of an achievement-set to it, that I can feel like I’m accomplishing something, which is a fun component for me, though slightly dangerous as I get obsessive about such things (Hello Gamerscore!)  But, it feeds a roleplaying tick that I have, and gives me an excuse to spend time with the lady, so, why not, right?

However, I must be honest with you all.  This game has problems.  Simplistic, easy to see, why the hell are they still there problems.  It just baffles my mind that the problems that I’m running into, each and every day are in the game.  Maybe they fired most of the developers?  I know quite a few people have moved on to other projects and companies, which isn’t saying much, since many of the problems are day one problems, or fairly old 05/06 issues, that still plague this game today.

So, while I’m taking a break from consistent 360 playing, and doing the EQ2 thing, I’m going to try something.  I’m going to post an issue daily.  Not a long post.  Just a WTF SOE post, to explain my displeasure with at least one thing I’ve found in the game.

When the list has grown, I will create a single thread with all the issues.  Hell, maybe SoE can use it as their QA issue database.  I question whether they have one with all the issues I’ve seen.

Problem 1)

Kilzak the Twisted

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Kilzak_the_Twisted

What is suppose to happen: He is suppose to give you AA, a special kind of Rare Experience.

What happens: He doesn’t.

Whenever you kill someone with a proper noun name, they are suppose to give you something called Achievement Points (AP, or AA as the community calls it, which is the name derived from EQ1).  Kilzak the Twisted doesn’t give AA.  He’s part of a questline, where the next boss in the series gives AA, so why not him?  Is “Kilzak the Twisted” a generic name?  Is it the name of a tribe of crazy human alchemists?  Maybe he is Bob, of the Kilzak the Twisted tribe.   WTF. 

See, AA was added post release…they most likely didn’t have a flag indicator in their monster database to mark if a monster was a named monster, so they probably went, line by line making monsters worth AA.  Why then did this guy get skipped?  Maybe they went by zone, because this guy is in a BFE zone, that people only go into for 15 minutes, late in the game, for this one quest..and I’m sure few people even do it anymore.  Do you think their monster database is split by zone?  I guess it could make sense, since very few monsters exist in multiple zones, maybe this table was overlooked.  I still don’t see why they couldn’t get a QA code monkey to sift through the database and update anything that even remotely looks like a named monster with AA.  Kilzak isn’t the first, or the last named monster I’ll run into that wont give me AA. 

So what happens when you petition SoE about it? 

I wanted you to know that I have forwarded your concerns about this quest to our development team. Unfortunately, I cannot say whether or not this will be changed in the future, but I wanted to thank you for providing feedback on this.

Galatee

Hey Galatee, I wasn’t even talking about quests, I was talking about named mobs.  Way to pick the wrong prewritten response.  Sorry SoE, this isn’t something you get to brush off and not fix.  Hire more data monkeys to fix your data.  Be consistent, because this is simply unprofessional.

You’re going to see this a lot:  games reviewed nearly a year after their release.  Why does it take us so long? Well, because we don’t get review copies.  Why don’t we get review copies? Well, no one reads our blog… and we are generally mean to every game we play. While I personally have a sadistic enjoyment from playing “bad” games, I hold no reservation with admitting they’re bad, thus ensuring no publisher will care to let us in early on the goods.  Still, the main reason we wait is because generally, in my opinion, these games just aren’t worth 59 dollars.  We wait 8 months, and get it for 1/5th it’s retail release price.  Games depreciate rather quickly for the most part, except for Atlus and a few others publishers that sometimes release very minimal pressings of games they expect to be niche.  Lucky for us, Viking: Battle for Asgard’s developers are owned by SEGA, and SEGA is a big dog, and tend to make big runs of their games, ensuring that an eventual price drop will see almost all their titles. 

Viking: Battle for Asgard! You’re speechless blonde Norwegian hero who refuses to wear armor no matter how many times blonde Norwegian mom tells him to. You’re charged with saving the world, because seriously, what Viking has ever tried to destroy things?  Battle the forces of evil, fighting 12 different enemy models across 3 islands!  THIS IS SO METAL!

So, to understand Viking: Battle for Asgard, we need to know where it originates.  Viking is a work from British development house, “The Creative Assembly” the guys have been around since 1987 and are most famous for their Total War series. 

Total War, totally

Total War was very well recieved. It was basically a Real Time War Strategy game that removed the micromanagement of building troops.  You just had your armies, and instead of individual units, you controlled multiple regiments of units. They were of the standard rock-paper-scissors flair, but you had to time when the unit hit the other units, what angle they attacked and their formation.  It was all about the strategy of meeting in war, and something I don’t think RTS games had done up to that point.  Their engine allowed many units to be drawn at the same time, creating a “Total War”.  It drew massive battles where formation and timing were key componets to winning.  The RTS guys ate it up, and it had quite a following.  Personally, I hated it.  I felt the troops reacted slowly, and I felt like I had little control of the game, after you gave your initial commands you basically just watched it unfold, selecting when to retreat, to try to route the enemies, etc.  I felt the frantic split second control of C&C or Age of Empires was far more enjoyable, but each to their own.  One thing they did really well though, is drawing massive war on your screen, I think Total War had the most units I’ve seen in a RTS, so, keep that in mind as we go forth, because what they learned here was definately implemented into their Viking engine.  

Having been absorbed by SEGA in 2005, they began work on a single player action hack/slash, Viking.  Now, remember, these guys got big into Total War, they released 5 games in the series.  As far as I can tell, Viking was their first Action game, so I’m not expecting perfection or anything, but it’s worth a note that they did attempt to shoehorn some of the Total War engine into this game.  Whilist the game’s main focus is on you, solo, fighting 1 to 5 enemies at a time, once you reach certain milestones in the game, you get to fight massive scale battles.  It’s not the same as Total War, you don’t control massive amounts of units, you’re controlling one man in a huge army, but they are obviously using the tricks they learned in total war to help render the enemies on the screen without a complete slowdown.  This is for the best in my opinion.  I’d rather control one guy well, then have a Total War-esque “Send your troops in and watch” feeling, that I feel was too passive.

Now that you know how they got here, lets break it down, Kotaku Style:

Play Vikings? Let me put on my enjoyment goggles.

Nice Open-ish world. - While the game is linear, it gave me a bit of freedom to explore.  The world was fun to look at, and I could do things somewhat out of order.  Unlike some action games, that you’re basically going through a tube ( Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden), you had the freedom to peruse the island unabated, unfortunately, this also lead to the problem of Running… 

The Stealth Tenchu-Z game - Ususally I’d complain about something like this.  When I expect something from a game, and get something else, it’s ususally a point of contention, but this was a pleasant surprise.  The game is basically Stealth Viking Assassin Creed Tenchu-Z extreme legends.  You do quite a bit of stealthing in this game. You’d think a giant viking, would be screaming from a quarter mile away in a insane rage as he charges his enemies, but no, our hero stealth kills fools with a long sword and a axe.  On hard mode, especially at the beginning when you have so few moves learned, it’s pretty much requierd, that when you’re liberating a settlement, you go in quiet, and thin the heared.  For what it’s worth, it was fun working your way in and out of a camp, cutting the numbers down, and the stealth dynamics weren’t that hard.  You auto-stealthed, and as long as your were in the back 180 degrees of your opponet, he didn’t see you coming.

Total War! - While I hate that this was shoe horned in, and wasn’t used a bit more often to give the game a more epic feel, the war scenes when you were overtaking an island were fantastic.  See, primarly in the game it was just you, preparing for war to recover the island’s capitol.  The majority of the time, you were alone, fighting a range of 1 to 5 enemies at a time, but at the climax of each island you’d get to go to war, and be a Dynasty Warriors style badass amoung hundreds of other soilders running around, pushing through a city to reclaim it.  Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t perfect. The war basically moved itself, your effect on it was little, other then it couldn’t move to the next section until you, yourself killed a shaman that was warping in soliders, thus allowing your armys to advance (Shamans, by the way, were another repetition factor.  Make some other bloomin’ battlefield objectives other then “kill the enemy shamans” ffs).  That all being said, it was still fun to be that one man in the army, very few games give you that, and it was an epic feeling.  Now and again you’d run into their side’s champion, or a giant, and your men and theirs would give you two space as you squared off, creating that leader vs leader feeling, which was quite fun. 

Achievements - They were good. We here at hateful like achievements that can be done in one playthru.  There is a “Beat game on Hard” and a “Beat game on Normal” achievement, but they stack, so one playthru of hard got us both.  Nearly all achievements were game progression based, except for some easily found hidden skulls and a few simple Kill X achievements.  Low stress factor for the achievements = more enjoyable game experience.

HURCH!

I Tapped that shit, UGH! - The game designers had this B button fetish, where they wanted it constantly tapped.  Found a warp stone? TAP THAT SHIT!  Found a chest? I’d tap that.  Vikings are tied up, lets TAP THAT!  Basically, almost everything you interacted with required a rapid, 5 second tapping of B.  From the developers perspective, I understand it, they did it so you wouldn’t interact with chests, or try to warp escape, or free your men, etc, while fighting monsters, because inevitably, within those 5 seconds, if a monster was chasing you, you’d be hit, and the tap would be broken.  It would have been better to just make those objects so they can’t be interacted with if in combat like every other game, instead of adding an annoying action and reinventing the wheel. 

The Beer keg syndrome - Did you know Vikings, when they wanted some spirits, simply went to the coast and searched for Beer kegs?  It’s a joke, but this game has Beer Keg Syndrome.  On the first island, you find beer kegs as a quest, neat!  But that quest is repeated on the second and third island.  You have to liberate a dragon on the first island to help in your war, you do the same on island two and three.  Every, single, thing you do on the first island, is repeated on the second and third island.  They could have switched it up, but it’s like they made one island, then just redid it twice, creating each slightly bigger with different terrain texture.  I mean I don’t expect the game to turn itself from a fighting hack slash to a Viva Pinata Viking Pet Collector, but hell, change the kegs to swords and spears, switch one of the islands up so it doesn’t have a dragon.  Change the takeover island formula from: Liberate cities/Find Kegs/Power Weapon/Free Dragon/Find Skulls/Take over Capitol, three times in a row, the exact same formula, really?

Another game, same old story - It’s a game based on Norse/Viking/Norwegian mythology.  It’s your Freyja, it’s your Odin, it’s another developer who couldn’t create their own story from scratch. Enough said. 

Cardboard gets all the love

Summary -  All and all, it’s a decent game.  Need an Action Hack/Slash fix? It’s a good fit.  Creative Assembly gives the normal offerings while adding in a twist of from their “Total War” background.  If you enjoy linear semi-open world Action, go for it.  Looking for a low stress achievement grind, this is also a great candidate.  Would I buy this at release?  I’m a cheapass, of course not, but really I don’t think it’s a 59 dollar value.  If you find it for 20 or less, snap it up, it’ll give you a good weekend and a half of enjoyment, there are worse games you can play.

Mass Effect has been beaten, 3 & 4/5th times! Ugh!

Come here often, baby?

Once on Casual!

Once on Hardcore!

Once on Insanity!

And, um, 4/5th of another run on Casual!

Why would you ever want to do a game, that many times? Because the achievements told me to! Sigh.  But even if that was not the case, Mass Effect, on the outset seems like one of the best rpgs for replay value, so it’s not too bad, right?. One of the best types of games to do multiple playthrus on, is rpgs within the subgenre of “Moral choice RPGS”*.  They’re pretty few and far between, but the euphoria of allowing your character to either be a nice guy, or a complete homicidal manic, is fairly satisfying. 

Mass Effect is a game of choice, letting you choose how to respond to situations, thus giving you what appears on the outset as a limitless possibilities.  But here’s the clincher, nothing really changes. After your second playthru, you’ll realize, your morale choices do not effect the game, at all, really.  The game is quite simply linear.  There are 5 areas you must go to, and everything else is a side quest.  No matter what  dialogue option you choose, all you’re really doing is choosing a different dialogue, the scenario completes fairly much the same.  Sure, it’s fun to pick the options that make you sound like an asshole, but it really doesn’t change the game.   “But, Rookerith! I choose an option that made some guy die, but tried it on another playthru and he lived!” Yes, true enough, but you still got the experience/pass code/key card/whatever, either way you did it.  Their family doesn’t come after you.  You never wake up in cold sweats because you let the guy die.  Your crew mates don’t leave you based on their moral beliefs.  You just generated a different cut scene and say, “rock on, I got 25 renegade points for pwning that fool.”   I guess I shouldn’t really complain, the replay value is there, you are seeing another possible outcome to a scenario, but there was honestly, no option to change the course of the game. 

What this really is, is a linear game. It’s not a strait line, but it’s more or less a wave, where you control just how jagged the line is on the way.  Don’t get me wrong, as I showed in an earlier blog post, it’s definately fun to see your character react to a certain situation differently, it is indeed a linear rpg.

Honestly, the fable series, and most other series fail at breaking the linear tradition.  I think Bethesda might have the formula for morale choice rpgs down better then most.  Elder Scrolls presents a primary goal, but the world is completely open, and slaughtering cities, or saving every girl in every town, on your way to the ultimate goal, is completely up to you.  Unlike Bethesda, I think Biowareis simply attempting to make a linear game, where you relate to the characters more, by controlling their voice.  I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with that, but I’d have liked to have seen more things change to make subsequent playthrus more exciting.

So, upon finding this game so linear, why did I play it so much?  Simple, because I wanted to have sex with the other chick also.  *coughs* I meant to say, achievements.  Bioware set the game up in such a way, that if you want all the achievements, you will be doing ATLEAST 3 playthrus.

1) The companions.  Six people join your ‘team’ early on, and you can select two to accompany you on any of your away missions.  It’s actually kinda cool, because you can pretend you’re in some Star Trek adventure, picking your perfect team for the given mission.  Not that it matters who you pick, because someone will always say whatever needed to be said at any given scenario, but it’s fun to pretend, right? It’s not like you get a “Crap, no computer expert, we’re screwed.”  Nope, the Krogan idiot just starts typing away like he’s a computer hacker. *shrugs*  This idea is thrown completely out the window by the companion achievements. There is one for each companion and they all read as “Play with this companion, for the majority of the game” and boy, do they mean it.  With taking two at a time, you’re stuck at atleast 3 playthrus.

2) The difficulties.  The game starts with Normal, and Casual difficulties open.  One playthru on either setting opens Hardcore.  Another playthru on Hardcore opens “Insanity”, and yay, there is an achievement for playing the game on Insanity.  Why developers feel they need to lock difficulty settings away, until we beat the game once, and in this bloody case, twice, is beyond me.  Add in the fact that you can replay your game with an existing character, wtih all his items, money and equipment, and insanity isn’t even hard.  I just don’t get the point. 

Thanks Prey, thanks for locking your “Cherokee” difficulty.  Thanks Call of Juarez, for making me collect hidden stuff in an easier difficulty to unlock “Very Hard”. Mass Effect,  thanks so much for locking TWO difficulty settings, one behind the other!  Classy of all three of you. I bet you all hang out together, in some snobbish english bar, musing together about just how clever you all are as you stroke your elegant English mustaches and drink your english brandy. Very posh of you! But we all know the truth, you tranny beer swilling yobs! Jolly good show, damnable brits! Where was I again, oh..

While I understand the reasoning, somewhat, for having achievements that require multiple playthrus, I think these games do themselves a disservice.  Our first playthru of an rpg is magical.  Our second is tedious.  The third time thru?  We start to notice all the problems with the game.  Few rpgs get multiple playthrus from people. They are meant to be epic, a one time affair.  People play through rpgs multiple times because it’s one of their favorites.  Mass Effect should have gotten multiple playthrus because people wanted to experience that magic again.  I’ve played through Final Fantasy IV many times, because I love the game.  If I was ‘forced’ to, I might not have enjoyed it.  Let this be a lesson to those that make rpgs! Make the game standup on it’s own.  Make achievements award players for beating the game.  Make your game good enough that people want to play it again, not a chore because they want some obscure achievement that requires a second playthru.

Moving on..

Vehicle in Mass Effect: What. The. Fuck.  Thanks Bioware, for creating, what I figure is the first rpg that isn’t an mmo, with downtime.  I don’t care how hard it was to drive the beast, having to wait 5 minutes for my shields to repair on my vehicle because the only thing that would fix it was ‘waiting’ was stupid, horribly stupid. I read half the 2nd Mass Effect novel while waiting for shields to repair.  Good game.

 Elevators in Mass Effect: What. The. Fuck.  I honestly don’t mind them, hehe. It’s just ‘popular’ to complain about them.  I’m sure they’re used as loading devices to load the next area, without a traditional loading screen.  Unfortunately, the time they take is static.  Even after installing the game to the harddrive of your xbox, the speed is not improved.  They made the time static, because they added filler.  You unlock missions via news reports heard in the elevators, and you hear fun banter between your two chosen companions now and again as you ride.  What really bothers me, is, it’s used for basically a recap of all your moral choices.  You’ll hear, “All the children died in the nursery as Spectre Shepard decided to burn the place down, to kill one terrorist.” vs “Shepard let a terrorist go free, at the cost of some rundown building full of expendable kids, bastard.”  — That example of a morale choice, de-evolves to a radio broadcast.  I just somewhat wish it meant more, as unrealistic as that appears to be.

Mordis says: “Bottom-line it for me”
1) Make your damn non-linear games actually branch out, make the choices I make, take me farther down a seperate path. Stop drawing me back towards the main path every time I try my damn hardest to get off of it.
2) Stop making achievements to make me play your horrible games multiple times.  I’ll play them a second time if they were good.  It’s the same basic annoyance I have with multiplayer achievements in games, that force you to play what is often a horrible tacked on multiplayer experience.  Be like Call of Duty 4 and up.  No multiplayer achievements there.  People play the multiplayer because it’s good, not because they want a stupid achievement to play 10,000 multiplayer rounds, or something of equal stupidity.

* Some more RPGS with Moral choice:  Fallout, Fable come to mind (Whew, this was a good year for moral choice enthusiast!) There is also a few on PC, like Vampire the Masquerade - redemption, the Witcher, and to some degree, KoToR, Jade Empire, and NWN.  Bioware and Bethesda are both good places to look, as their catalog of rpgs tend to defer to that subgenre.

*sighs*  I just hope next year we get the former president of Toaplan to jump up on a float, and give us a “All your base” rendition.

Ran across this today.  It’s about nine shades of awesome.  Fan-made movie of Mega Man that if this trailer is any indication, it doesn’t blow.  Here’s a link to Eddie Lebron, the director’s page about it.  The actual movie’s site seems to be down due to traffic.

Anyhow, I thought you’d enjoy seeing this, what good fan fiction of MegaMan is, after my dreadful Yaris/Mega Man fan fiction.