Killed in a smiling accident.

To the one hundred and thirty or so bloggers out there who posted the Warhammer Online release date, with perhaps a token copy and paste of the blurb output by Mythic’s ineluctable hype machine.

Why?

I have a copy of the Warhammer Online newsletter in my inbox this morning, one whole day after having to trawl through an RSS Feed List that was triple its normal size, and guess what that newsletter tells me, here’s a hint: it’s not telling me anything to do with the release date of Wrath of the Lich King.

Does this stem from that laughable notion that bloggers are somehow related to the press? Is this some sort of “Stop the presses!” “Hold the front page!” mentality, because if you hadn’t noticed there are no presses, and the front pages of blogs don’t need to be held (they are in fact quite self confident and don’t need the comforting reassurance of someone’s body pressed against them). There is no scoop to be had, because this is not a format where if you get the story out ahead of your rivals they may not be able to repeat the story to their readership for a whole day because they missed their print deadline.

And what boggles the mind more are those who post a day or even two later with such one line news items. Did you even look at your RSS feeds before you posted? Did you not see the one HUNDRED posts already stating exactly the same? And you… you posted it anyway.

Let us all take a moment to bow our heads, close our eyes, clasp our hands together and boggle quietly to ourselves.

Boggle

Please, for the love of whichever Almighty it is that you observe, stop doing this. Next time you decide to post release date ‘news’, try to add two or three paragraphs of insightful commentary on why this is an interesting event and what it means in the context of the MMO genre. If you can’t do it, then it’s probably not worth posting it; do you really think that you’re informing anyone? Let’s face it, if your blog is not alphabetically first in people’s RSS reader of choice, you’re already posting old information.

Cue a raft of blogs named AAA MMO Blog and AAAAA MMO Blog.

There is a hypothetical being, we shall call him Toh Ken, who is crouched over a steam powered cog-based computer console in the basement of a monastery high in the mountains of Xiahe County, and who is only now managing to read the first few posts from his RSS reader which takes three days to process the feed through its analytical engine and then scribe the content onto vellum using a small feather quill attached to a miniature piston-driven brass arm.

To Toh Ken you are, perhaps, posting astonishing and fascinating news. To everyone else in the world, you are just posting token 1up-post-count content.

Stop it.

I finished playing Mass Effect the other night, it’s a good game but quite short if you fail to undertake all the side quests that it throws at you, so I was rather surprised when the end credits started rolling. Still, not a huge problem because I have Assassin’s Creed and Gears of War sitting on the back burner waiting for me. I decided to go with Assassin’s Creed first, just because I thought a bit of fantasy would be a nice break, having sci-fi’d myself out a bit for the time being with Mass Effect.

So, Assassin’s Creed it is. I’ve only just started playing the game, so here are some brief first impressions.

The game is gorgeous with a capital ‘oh I think I need to change my underwear’. The cities in the game are beautifully realised, detailed and utterly believable; the immersion factor from the scenery is approaching ‘total’ on the enthrall-o-meter. However, the game-play elements quickly whip out a silent deadly blade, stick one hand around the graphic’s mouth and stab it squarely in the back. There’re the Convenient Monks of Convenience and their incredible ability to turn up and have a bit of an aimless wander around just at the point where you might need to get into a guarded building. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, you have the ability to blend with these white robed monks, which essentially translates to you standing in the centre of a diamond formation of four monks, after which guards will ignore you. First problem: it’s the same four monks, in the same formation every time; the blending feature is a fantastic idea, but would it really have been that tricky to vary the size of the group of monks, and perhaps make the group more than four large, because that leads us on to the second problem: these must be the most stupid guards in the world if they can’t spot the odd one out, here you try:

You are a guard in front of the keep of your master, who is very wary of assassins attempting to approach him and introduce his pancreas to the wrong end of a short sharp blade. You have been tasked with guarding the entrance at all costs, and thus you examine the crowds as they wander past. You see a group of monks approaching. You inspect them more closely.

You see five monks, the first monk is wearing a white robe. The second monk is wearing a white robe. The third monk is wearing a white robe. The fourth monk is wearing a white robe. The fifth monk is wearing a white robe; he also appears to have a longsword hanging by his left leg, a small short blade strapped across his back, five throwing knives strapped to the back of his right shoulder and leather arm bracers that look suspiciously as though they might conceal blades.

Do you:

a) Ask the fifth monk if he’s an assassin and trying to kill your master.
a) Raise the alarm and prepare for the fight of your life as you try to apprehend an assassin.
a) Ask your fellow guard mates to just confirm that that bloke in the middle of the four monks is clearly an assassin and that you should all probably hit him with sharp metal sticks.

or

b) Ignore the group of monks, clearly they’re just wandering into your master’s keep because they enjoy sight-seeing around the military garrisons of the old world.

If you answered ‘a’, well done, reward yourself with a small chocolate coated biscuit. If you answered ‘b’, oh dear, punish yourself with a small chocolate coated brisket.

The other stand-out farcical element is the journey on horseback between cities. Again the animation and scenery is breathtaking, and then you ride past a set of guards at anything faster than a gentle canter and all hell breaks loose and they attempt to chase you down and kill you. I just didn’t realise that they had such speed limits in place in the medieval Middle East. Each time you ride out is like an episode of Smokey and the Bandit in the Middle Ages, with you trying to make your way as quickly as possible to the next city before you die of boredom, all the while trying to avoid the speed traps set by old smokey, and when you inevitably set one off, a chase sequence that makes Cannonball Run look like Bullet.

I guess it’s amusing in its own way, and I now make a “Breaker, breaker for the Bandit.” “Come on back, breaker.” “Well, what’s your handle son and what’s your 20?” “My handle is Smokey Bear and I’m tail grabbin’ your ass right now!” commentary as I ride along, which brightens things up a little, if nothing else.

Other than that I haven’t really experienced enough of the game to say whether I like it sufficiently to recommend it to others (unless you happen to like cheesy ’80s comedy police chases, in which case by all means grab it, breaker breaker) but I will say that the combat feels pretty clunky at the moment, with nice ideas in the special moves available, but with the implementation leaving something to be desired. Maybe I just need more practice.

Or maybe I need to stop air-guitaring Battle Without Honor or Humanity and concentrate more on the fight at hand instead.

Following Zoso’s post regarding the freebies available for a short time on Tor, I took the opportunity to grab a couple of the books on offer and have myself a bit of a read. Unfortunately the books listed didn’t have any descriptions listed alongside, and being the lazy bugger that I am I couldn’t be bothered to research each one on Amazon. So I went for the <voice style=”reverb: on; volume: booming; pitch: low”>random click of destiny</style> and hoped that I’d picked something I could get in to.

The first book was John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, a decent enough space romp with a slightly different take on the ‘downloadable personality’ theme as seen in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon and elsewhere. Scalzi has created a universe that is both interesting and believable, with compelling races and individuals that leave you wanting to find out more about them, and although the main story is a little uninspiring, the secondary storyline - based around the main character himself, his history and the moral dilemmas he faces as life as he knows it is turned on its head - allows the reader to really engage with the book as a whole and to be immersed in the ideas and themes that Scalzi presents. Obvious comparisons can be drawn to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and, as mentioned earlier, Morgan’s Altered Carbon, so if you enjoyed either of those two books then you probably won’t be disappointed with Old Man’s War.

The second book was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire, a really rather excellent fantasy story that pleasantly surprised me with its well presented world, its likeable-without-being-mawkish characters and the real star of the show: Allomancy.

Allomancy is the system of magic that Sanderson has created, and instead of having it as some innate unseen power that requires hugely bearded men to sit hunched over dusty old tomes for years on end to achieve, Allomancy instead manifests itself as more of a mutation that is powered by various metals that the Allomancer must ingest and then ‘burn’ to activate the power. There are a number of known metals that can be used in this way, each giving the Allomancer a different power when they burn the metal, but they gain this power only for as long as the metal lasts since it is consumed as the Allomancer uses the power, hence the term ‘burning’ to represent the use of the power. Unlike magic in many other books though, the art of Allomancy is still not entirely understood, and this leaves the door open for things to be twisted around and for plenty of surprises to be unleashed on the main characters and the reader.

The world of the Final Empire is one of a class of nobles who rule over an underclass of slaves known as Skaa, all of whom are presided over by the Lord Ruler, the hero of a past age, who is now immortal - a shard of God - and controls the land with an iron fist. The lands themselves are a depressing affair, with what little vegetation that manages to grow under the ash-filled sky being nothing but dull brown; nobody knows what colourful plants look like, although it is hinted that they did exist in the time before the ascension of the Lord Ruler.

The story is nothing out of the ordinary, with the standard framework of the underclass rising up to overthrow their oppressors through the efforts of a select band of unlikely heroes, but it does throw some nice twists in along the way. However, there is an undercurrent of another story which is not fully expounded upon, and The Final Empire clearly leaves the door wide open for the second and third books to sate the reader’s desire to find out more about the trials of the Lord Ruler a thousand years ago: what was this Deepness that he faced? And if he succeeded in defeating it as we are led to believe, why did the land change so much for the worse afterwards? There are some answers in the first book, just enough to whet the appetite and keep the reader wanting more as the main story of the first book comes to its, perhaps inevitable, conclusion.

I could best describe Mistborn: The Final Empire as having a strong bouquet of Eddings, with a light fragrant sensation of Jordan on the palette and subtle undertones of Lynch and Gemmell.

It’s a credit to Tor, and hopefully in its own small way encouraging to authors and publishers out there, that I’ve already ordered all three books in the series, and I’m certainly keen to find out what the story is behind this fascinating world that Sanderson has created. I bought the first book because, although having read it, I’d like to give the author the sale, and there’s nothing like having a paper copy of a book, the creased and wrinkled spine and loose well-fingered pages a simple testament to one’s enjoyment of the story within. So putting a free copy of the first book in the series on to the web has resulted in at least one new fan, and a few sales, and more importantly I’d like to think that I’m not out of the ordinary in doing so. Not only that, but it has also inspired this little reviewlet which I hope, in turn, might turn some of you on to the idea of trying this excellent little trilogy yourselves.

Well done Tor for seeing the advantage in this sort of marketing strategy, and I hope it works out well for the authors involved.

This is my Shepard.

There are many like her, but this one is mine.

And in the grand tradition of the greatest starship captains, here she is getting jiggy with a blue-skinned alien chick.

Oh my.

<Cravat explodes>

Are badgers simply the criminal element of Ger society, and somewhere in the wild there is an as yet undiscovered policing subfamily of blue and white striped Mustelidae called the goodger?

Who knows! I must confess that it was just meant as a distraction, a piece of flavoursome bait placed carefully on the ground, covered in leaf litter and attached to a thick vine rope that will snag you by the leg, swing you up into the captive audience tree and force you to hang there so that I can bludgeon you with rather rudimentary ruminations regarding MMOs without risk of reprisal.

My apologies.

But hey, now that you’re here and conveniently immobilised hanging upside down by your mind’s leg (a bit like your mind’s eye, but it allows your mind to wander), I feel perhaps that you would be receptive to a little wistful blathering on my part about one of my favourite hobbies. If during the course of my diatribe you start to feel faint, hallucinate or develop an intense migraine, it is possibly just the blood rushing to your head as you dangle there, on the other hand these are also known side effects when listening to me for any extended period of time.

So the real question I want to pose is this: is ‘massive’ the wrong focus for multiplayer online RPGs?

I’ve recently started playing Mass Effect due to my need for a single player game that can be dropped at the scream of a baby (which is like the drop of a hat, only faster and requiring more poo clearing), and for the short amount of time that I’ve played it I’ve enjoyed the experience tremendously. However, somewhere at the back of my mind there is the parasite of dissatisfaction, nibbling delicately on my pia mater and making me wonder how much better the game would be if my two fellow adventurenauts weren’t controlled by an AI suffering dementia on a scale that would make HAL’s red eye turn green with envy, but were instead controlled by my close friends, who I am happy to report are not demented in the slightest. Although based on the witterings of this post, that may not be as much of an endorsement as I had intended. Fighting the parasite of dissatisfaction are the antibiotics of immersion, which help me to look past the fact that my compatriots in the game have had their intelligence modelled on the philosophies and theorems of an especially thick oak sideboard and their movement routines lifted wholesale from the frantic rampage of a hyperactive puppy with chronic diarrhoea, by pointing out that all the NPCs, every other character in the game in fact, is a paragon of subtle method acting and restrained existence. There are no crowds of people whizzing past me at full pelt blowing raspberries and emoting in spurious ways, no diplomats or traders spinning through three hundred and sixty degrees as they bounce back and forward between two spots of the queue they’re waiting in. None of them dance naked on top of the Citadel tour guide terminals. Everyone I speak to uses sentences, none of them talk in tongues, I mean not one person has shouted out in the alien embassies “HAI EVR1 LUVS ME COS I TLK LEIK GIBBON”.

The level of immersion is intense. Well apart from the times when I, as commander, tell my squad to move forward and hold a position; off we charge, assault rifles blazing, I’m taking a bit of damage, actually a bit more damage than I should if I was being given covering fire and so I search around for said coverers. Lo and behold, my squad have in actual fact run in the opposite direction to the one I commanded and are even now having a competition to see who can repeatedly ram their crotch the hardest into the sentry gun we skirted around earlier, while it merrily plugs away at the privates’ privates.

The thought that followed was: could I have had this experience in World of Warcraft? I’m talking about the immersion part here not the crotch ramming team-mate part, for that I’d just need to join the first pick-up group I could find. The answer was: quite possibly, if I’d taken the time to learn how to run a private (read pirate) server, a server where I just granted accounts to my friends, and perhaps a few of their closest friends. The world would still be populated with NPCs, the major cities would be no more empty than they currently are, Shattrath, Ogrimmar and Stormwind excepted, and yet the world would be entirely devoid of smacktards intent on ruining your gaming experience in whatever manner possible.

I then wondered, what if WoW itself was like that by default? Instead of logging into a single server with a population of six thousand people, what if guilds in the game actually had their own instance of a server? You’d log into your server and all the PCs would be guild mates, and they’d all (assuming you were sensible with who you invited) share the same goals and want the same things from the game. What advantages might this set-up have?

For a start, players would feel more like the hero in the traditional fantasy tale, part of a select group of individuals who were destined to change the world, not a nondescript part of the shambling mass of quest tourists and January Loot Sale fanatics that currently ravage Azeroth on a daily basis. The community would be small and close knit, and individuals in that community would have greater opportunities to make a name for themselves and create legends around their character. It would be easier to make player-driven storylines, because giving just one character the Immortal Songblade of Arsewhopping on a server wouldn’t mean that thousands of other players were missing out on having that item. It would also be easier to allow players on a small guild server to be able to affect the world around them in a way that mattered and changed it permanently, because again it wouldn’t be denying that experience to thousands of other players. I also imagine that the virtual world would feel less claustrophobic, because when you take your first tentative steps into the foreboding Forest of Dark & Doom[TM], you wouldn’t peer around the first set of trees only to see an entirely deforested swampland with the indigenous population of Flaming Hellforged Dire Wolves of Armageddon dashing past you, yelping and with their tails between their legs, as one hundred and forty adventurers clatter after them screaming “LOOOOOL”.

Not to mention that you could kiss goodbye to any gold seller chat and mail spam, because without an invite to your server, they’re not getting near you. There could be a public server for trial accounts, and I’m sure the gold sellers would make the place the home of their verbal fallout, but from a subscription sales point of view, it would only encourage players to subscribe and join their own private haven free from such unctuous spiced ham and the inevitable vituperation that follows.

There are many disadvantages even outside of the technical limitations, of course, but those that I have thought of so far are not all that bad, and certainly worth enduring to remove the smacktarded majority whilst maintain the ability to explore and adventure with others. Auction houses, for example, could be linked between server instances, so that all saleable items appeared to all players of the game, hence a universal economy would exist even with the worlds being instanced. And although there’s no real solution to the ‘fancy meeting you here’ effect, where you just happen to meet the same fellow adventurers day after day, you can look at it another way: Lord of the Rings would have been even harder to keep up with if the main cast had changed entirely on a daily basis, and besides, it’s not really any different from having a guild that you regularly group to the exclusion of pickup groups and others.

Obviously this is all dependent on the type of MMO. Planetside, for example, would probably be pretty dull with forty to fifty people on the server, although having said that, Starsiege Tribes didn’t have many more per game, and it was still brilliant fun, but then its maps were a lot smaller. EVE lends itself well to having as many concurrent players as its infrastructure can handle, but then its ‘world’ is actually a universe, which slightly edges out the two meagre continents of Azeroth in terms of ’space for player to spread out in’.

Perhaps my point isn’t that these multiplayer games should not be massive at all, but that the measure of the massiveness shouldn’t necessarily be the number of concurrent players in the world but could in certain circumstances focus on the number of instances of the world. Just look at the constant demand for new servers from players in World of Warcraft, who want a fresh start and another crack at the world before everything has been done and completed; if the game offered you the chance to create a new fresh instance of the world whenever you wanted, and to only invite those people who you consider to be friends or to have the same play-style or mindset as you, would people find less of a problem with reaching the end-game and stagnating?

Although, all things considered, I have enough problems with alternative characters in MMOs, without the option of creating alternative worlds.

I think I just invented multiversitus.

Anyway, must dash, I can hear goodger sirens approaching; they must have found that stash of bread and milk I stole from old Mrs Crumbly’s garden.

World of Warcraft’s achievements system will launch with more than 500 individual achievements covering every aspect of game-play, and our man on the inside at Blizzard has given us a few of the more common achievement titles and their respective achievements to be found when Wrath of the Lich King launches:

• Glider: Have epic shoulders that are more than twice your characters height in width.
• Opportunist: Steal at least five guild banks within a month.
• Man Eater: Obtain a flying mount by cybering with male guild members.
• True Man Eater: Obtain a flying mount by cybering with male guild members. (Female players only)
• Mercenary: Join at least ten raiding guilds within a week with the same character.
• Triumph of Hope over Experience: Join at least fifty PUGs.
• Outraged: Use the phrase “slap in the face” in at least one hundred forum posts.
• Overcompensator: Have an epic weapon that’s more than twice your character’s height in length.
• Irony Champion: Shout three hundred times in the general channel for spammers to stop flooding the general channel.
• Abasement: Maintain a seven-days-a-week raid schedule for at least four months.
• Ridickeweluss: Attempt to use the word ‘ridiculous’ in a forum post and fail miserably.
• Cavernous Cakehole: Type two thousand words in ALL CAPS.
• Milliner: Possess at least 15 hats.
• Drama Tank: Quit and rejoin the same guild at least five times.
• All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go: Join at least ten PUGs that stand outside of an instance for half an hour waiting for a tank or healer, then disband.
• Nemesis of Originality: Create four characters with names that are rubbish variations on Legolas.
• Validated: Link fifty items in guild chat in one play session.
• Dust Collector: Spend two hundred hours posing outside the auction house or bank.
• Lust Collector: Spend two hundred hours as a naked dancing female night elf outside the auction house or bank.
• Wganker the G is Silent: Gank one hundred players that are at least half your character’s level.
• The Cycle Continues: Get ganked fifty times in Stranglethorn Value by a level 70, then return at level 70 and gank at least fifty players.
• Sun Tzu of the Battlegrounds: Shout eighty helpful commands in battlegrounds like “HEAL!” and “OMG U NOOBS!!!”
• You Don’t Want To Do That: Instruct at least three classes that you have never played how to perform their role, and what their spec should be.
• Horse’s Ass: Sit with your big, fat, show-off mount in such a way as to prevent other players from accessing an NPC for thirty hours.
• Bedhopper: Co-habit with three different guild members in real life.
• Guildhopper: Co-habit with three members of different guilds in real life.
• Mormon: Co-habit with three different guild members simultaneously in real life.
• The Greatest Person in the World Ever: Win at least one arbitrary race against a level one character whilst on your epic mount, or one duel against a level one character whilst wearing your complete set of Tier 7.
• Practising for Real Life: Spend three days begging for gold in a capital city.
• Always Doing Doughnuts: Never remain stationary for more than one second before jumping/running around in circles again.
• Moustache: Loot twenty quest objectives/gathering nodes from under the nose of a person who’s just pulled a mob away from them.
• Full House of Originality: Have characters named after an individual from Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dragonlance, The Belgariad and the Chronicles of Narnia.
• Blizzard’s Bitch: Achieve more than one hundred achievements the day Wrath of the Lich King is launched on all five of your level seventy characters.
• Sarcastic Blogger: Make up at least twenty five vaguely insulting achievements.

To a certain set of bloggers out there, who shall remain unnamed.

Dear Warhammer Online developers,

I know that you’re kind of busy at the moment what with having to, according to the more dramatic bloggers out there, remove three hundred and fifty billion percent of your game because you felt it wasn’t up to scratch. I understand that you’re trying to make your game feature and content rich, and that you’ve perhaps bitten off slightly more than you had budgeted mastication resources for, but here are a couple of ideas that I had this morning that might be fun to add (if you haven’t done so already, I’m not in the beta so I wouldn’t know):

If you’re going to have a copy of World of Warcraft’s armoury for your players, and I imagine you are because one would think that in a PvP-centric game, bragging to others is basically the core philosophy behind the design, could you go one step further and have a little Flash plug-in that people could stick on their website? This plug-in that I’m picturing would display a nice 3D-model of whatever character the player decides to show, rotatable through three hundred and sixty degrees, perhaps with a slightly tweaked renderer to make the character look like the classic Games Workshop lead models that we all know, love and have chewed upon in our youth more than is probably healthy. I imagine this character model could even be displayed complete with the little 30mm circular base with slightly dodgy looking foam grass.

Even better (and I’m sure you can slot this in too because you’re not very busy at the moment right?) have an interface to allow the player to paint their figure; I mean, half the fun of the miniatures game was painting your troops in custom colours, so why not continue the hobby with the online game. One of the things I find most depressing about many of the current stock of MMOs is the general lack of character customisation, the fact that there are very few options where the player can express their creativity and originality through their character; the reason I’ve stayed subscribed to City of Heroes for so long is the fact that if the generally grindy game-play becomes too dull, I can always flex my creativity muscle, give my muse a prod and create a bizarre new manifestation from my brain spasms.

Secondly, and along the same lines, have the plug-in also give access to the player’s Tome of Knowledge for that character, such that people can see their achievements easily but in the context of the game interface, thus making it easy for players of the game to navigate. Assuming you’ve got a suitably Hemlokian Nifty! feature in the Tome for it to capture screenshots and store them like a photo album, this would provide bloggers with an easy way to share their character’s adventures without having to constantly crop/thumbnail/rotate/gamma correct/frame in oak their own screenshots.

I’m confidant that this would all be easy to do, probably only a couple of lines of code, and so I’m sure you can fit it in during a lunch break or something.

Love and kisses,

Melmoth.

I’m still chuckling. I think that’s me, and also some of my friends, in twenty years time. (It’d be us now, but we don’t have the elbow patches, I must remember to speak to Howard Moon about that when I next see him).

More of the same genius from Phil Selby over at The Rut.

In a conversation this morning, Elf enquired as to how things were with me, to which I responded:

Work is slightly quieter at the moment, which is giving me one less thing to worry about as I continue to try to grapple with parenthood and fail my attack roll.

Now I’d like to blame the fact that I had been listening to the Dungeons & Dragons Podcast featuring Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, and PvP’s Scott Kurtz. However, in actual fact, I’m just one of those sad people - and I’m sure there are many others of my ilk - who can happily describe their lives in the terms of D20 combat mechanics without batting an eyelid.