Buggy and Incomplete Games: Part 2

Age of Conan. Oh, you thought you'd gotten off easy when I didn't mention you straight away, didn't you? Well, you're in the spotlight now, for the main reason that the game was released with no high-level content included. As if that weren't enough, the voiceovers they were bragging about weren't done, the combat system that was supposed to be revolutionary is about as deep as a puddle, and the graphics run like my gaming rig is a ten-year-old word processing machine begging to be put out of its misery.

Everything about this is game feels like it's been done wrong. The character classes are pretty much your run-of-the-mill variations on the character classes from every other MMO we've played, and while that's not necessarily bad it's not exactly ground-breaking either. Just once, I'd like an MMO to break the standards and come up with something new entirely, or just let characters make up their own classes.

Oh, wait. Champions Online is doing that? Well, bravo. Maybe that one will be a grind-fest worth playing for more than two months.

Anyway, back to the shittiness. As I said, Age of Conan was released with much of its content unfinished, including - at least at the time of release - all the high-level items and gear. So when a player reached, say, level 20, they were rewarded not by a sense of accomplishment but by an utter vaccum of content in which the enemies kept getting stronger and stronger but the player wasn't getting better swag to compensate.

And then there are the voiceovers. This was something of a revolutionary idea for an MMO, which, until AoC, had at best voice acting during the opening cutscene, and at worst none whatsoever. Age of Conan endeavored to change this by giving every lazy "kill x amount of y at z"-quest-giving NPC a fully scripted and voice-acted conversation. And it did make the world more immersive and the characters more compelling - for the 10% of NPCs that it was done for. The rest were just mysteriously silent, and after having rather good voice acting for everyone you talked to that felt a lot like being punched in the kidney.

And as if that weren't enough, the combat system that was supposed to be revolutionary... wasn't. It was described as a syatem where you judged each enemies strengths and weaknesses in meele combat, and then attacked them based on which area was the least protected. For example, if an enemy is holding a shield in their left hand, you attack their right side. This sounds amazing, but instead of revolutionizing combat it just served to confuse it. Instead of the hotbar-mashing single-minded attacking of World of Warcraft (which I don't like either, so that I don't confuse anyone's simple mind), you ended up pressing one of three buttons based on which side of your enemy (left right or center) had the least lines and therefore the least defense. Then you got attacks that attacked certain areas of the enemy and could potentially become useless if the enemies you were fighting happened to be guarding that particluar area heavily. They get an A for effort, but a big stinking F for execution.

Speaking of execution, whoever optimized the graphics in this game should be dragged out into the street and shot. I played Age of Conan when it first came out, and I could barely play it. I will say that the opening cutscene's graphics were extremely promising, and looked so very pretty I considered smacking myself just for the effect. And then I got into the game itself. Let me make clear that my computer is a gaming rig that I've invested a lot of time and money in. it runs games like Crysis - the game people joked couldn't be run by NASA supercomputers - at medium/high settings. So when I tell you that trying to run Age of Conan on Medium settings brought my computer to its knees, you should know that something has gone awry. The game didn't look anywhere near pretty enough to justify sucking up a gigabyte of video memory, so why was the camera skipping around like I was playing Age of Conan: The Flipbook? Even on low settings, my computer could only churn out 14 or so FPS - and that's with a view distance such that anything beyond ten meters or so just turns gray.

So, in conclusion, Age of Conan HULK SMASH HULK SMASH HULK SMASH.

In all seriousness, Age of Conan was a promising game that lost most of its appeal due to the fact that it was most likely rushed out the door before it was done. I can accept a game like an MMO being released with some bugs, because it's just impossible to play-test every inch of such massive worlds. But when you release a game with actual content missing, you're doing it wrong.

Next post: Gamestop. RAGE.

Buggy and incomplete games - do not want.

I said I'd make a post about publishers rushing games out the door to turn a profit as quickly as possible, so here it is.

This is kind of a "HULK SMASH" thing for me (also, I've been reading World War Hulk). It just, on any level, does not make sense - unless you're one of the corporate bigshots whose pockets are being lined with the shattered hopes of consumers worldwide.

The idea is that by hyping the game for six months before you release it, then shoving it out the door regardless of how well it plays, you'll get thousands upon thousands of people to buy the game based off the hype. Then they discover that the game - that they were promised was stolen in solid gold form from the very hidden treasure vaults of Narnia itself and painsakingly decoded and translated into a form that would work on the very best of next-gen technology to deliver the best gaming experience until complete virtual reality - is instead at best simply a decent game and at worst a complete excercise in shittiness.

This leaves the gamer thouroughly dissapointed in the game, but the problem is they've already boguht it. And what do the big shots care? They have the unwitting consumer's money, mission accomplished, right? All the poor gamer can hope to do is sell his used game back to a retailer for maybe 10% of what he paid for it, at which point they mark it up to nearly the full retail price, but with no gaurentee it will even work. I am speaking, of course, about retailers like Gamestop. HULK. SMASH. Gamestop shall get a seperate post, since I don't feel like changing tracks here.

Age of Conan. Oh, you thought you'd gotten off easy when I didn't mention you straight away, didn't you? Wll, you're in the spotlight now, for the main reason that the game was released with no high-level content included. As if that weren't enough, the voiceovers they were bragging about weren't done, the combat system that was supposed to be revolutionary is about as deep as a puddle, and the graphics run like my gaming rig is a ten-year-old word processing machine begging to be put out of its misery.

I have class. I'll finish this later.

I was wrong.

Spore came loaded to the proverbial gills with DRM software. And do you know the funny thing? The game was cracked and leaked on the internet, 100% playable, two days before its release date. The DRM that EA spent so much money developing and adding to the game did absolutley nothing in terms of preventing piracy, and the paying cutsomers still got the shaft. There's talk that EA is releasing a patch within the week that will remove the DRM from the game, but until that time...

Man the pirate ships.

A temporary solution.

I guess I'll just be deleting polls and re-adding new ones as a method to ask real questions. When the voting ends I'll try to keep a record in a separate post, at least until I figure out a better way.

In the meantime, enjoy the new question.

Another Journalism assignment.

I'm feeling pretty good about the article I "published". There aren't any typos I'm aware of (it does help to be using Firefox, which has a built-in spell checker). I've got a lot more than one quote, although I did the names in reverse - I started with the full name, but rather than switch to using only the last name, I was using only the first. I don't know how strict of a guideline this is, but hopefully it's not bad. I know the quotes are accurate - considering I was recording the interview, I'd say my note-taking ability is flawless. (Tounge-in-cheek, of course.) In all seriousness, the notes I jotted down helped me remember important phrases I wanted to quote, and the recording ensured they were accurate. I don't feel particularly strongly about being "published", though it really isn't the first time, is it?

I'm a good writer. I don't say this because I feel like inflating my ego, I say it because I've been told countless times that it's true. In high school, my senior year English teacher was the best english teacher I've ever had. Other teachers focused on grammar, and sentence structure. He focused on writing, and word use, and how to make your sentences come alive. He showed us how to write cleanly and clearly, and while he didn't teach us much about grammar (we had, after all, been doing it our whole lies, and he didn't want to waste time on it unless he had to) he was a stickler for proper syntax. He made the quality of my writing improve about a thousand times, simply by teaching us what we really wanted to learn.

Now, the reason I bring this up now is so that when I say that reading the article on me made me twich invoulantarily, you will understand my full meaning. From the opening sentence - "Not a lot of things inspire him to be who he is," - to the title (Technician Magician? Really?) to the numerous and astounding factual errors, not to mention the grammatical maze the author has written herself, I could almost feel the hatred for every word of this article ready to burst from my chest in a blaze of palpable rage.

I could correct every single thing that's wrong with this article, but there are easier, faster ways to commit suicide. For example, in talking about Broadway by the Bay, the author says it's a play which I'm trying to get into, implying to the unaware that I intend to be an actor. This is completley untrue. The theater is called Broadway by the Bay. The play is called Into the Woods. And I'm not trying to "get into" it, I'm working on Stage Crew. Two simple mistakes have changed the meaning of this sentence entirely, and frankly I'm appaled at such a casual error being made - and the article is littered with them.

Does the beginning of the article make me want to read more? No. "Not a lot of things inspire him to be who he is." The first time I read this article, I stopped there, and the article is about me. When the subject of the profile doesn't want to read the article you wrote about him, you're doing something wrong.

I can't go on. I really can't. At this point it should be obvious how I feel about the article.

Those of you who want to read the article for yourselves can find it here.

Stardock drafts "The Gamer's Bill of Rights"

They're doing it right.

There's been a lot of controversy between gamers over DRM issues and games being rushed out the door lately. So imagine my delight when Stardock, an independent developer/publisher of some pretty fantastic games, goes and throws us a bone like this.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, DRM (Digital Rights Management) is essentially software that companies are starting to install with games that we purchase. It limits the amount of times the game can be installed based on different criteria.

The idea behind DRM is to halt piracy, which is good in theory. However, it plays out rather horribly. Companies that use DRM software in their games are essentially treating the customers like the crooks. While the people who pirate the game will have a crack within the week that will render the DRM worthless, those of us who did the right thing and bought the game will have to deal with it forever.

In the case of Mass Effect, BioWare's latest blockbuster RPG, the DRM software included with the PC version of the game only allowed for three installations before the game was worthless. In and of itself, that's an outrage - you don't buy a movie or book and expect to be able to use it a limited amount of times before you have to buy it again, why should games be different? But as if that weren't bad enough for them, BioWare apparently didn't take into account was that the "average" PC gamer is constantly tweaking and upgrading their rig to run the latest games, and the DRM installed "used up" a new installation any time the system's hardware was changed. One user even reported that the DRM chewed up a new installation every time she restarted, and another said the installations were failing but the DRM was flagging them as used anyway. This is, of course, unverifiable, but most people can agree that technology can be a fickle thing and this sort of thing is all too plausible.

I, personally, will never trust my hard-earned money to a game or company that's going to treat me like a thief when I've done nothing wrong. I don't care if it's Starcraft 2 or Spore (which, notably, probably will not include DRM, so I don't start a panic), if it has DRM software it's not making my list of games to buy.

This has turned into a pretty long post; I'll bitch about incomplete and buggy games being released later - I'm looking at you, Age of Conan.

Take your time to vote.

The poll voting deadline has been extended to 2099. This is because I have no idea how to add a new question without deleting the old one entirely.