Blue Kae

So Battlestar Galatica is coming to the MMO genre. I’m not surprised by that. The remake has been very popular and profitable for the SF network (that’s as close as I can bring myself to use their new name), so it makes sense that they’ll look for more ways to capitalize. I wasn’t a big fan of the show, so I’m not excited about the announcement. Besides that, though I wonder how successful they’ll be able make a game that appeals to fans of the show.

For people who loved the show, this is a pretty iconic image.

The characters, the relationships, and the drama were what made the show popular. These are not the kinds of things that MMOs have done well so far.

This is an image from the console game that was released a little while back.

I’m not referencing the game specifically, just pointing out that combat is primarily what MMOs focus on, and that is not what most fans of the show will be interested in.

Hopefully, I’m being overly critical and it’ll turn out well for the developer. Ironically, if it turns out to be a semi-realistic physics based space combat simulator, I’ll be more interested than if it is closer to what made BSG popular.

Volume 3 launched a few days ago. There’s lots of good info (and podcasts) at Casual Stroll to Mordor and LotRO Reporter as usual if you want details on the patch.

What I wanted to mention is how much more I enjoyed the new content than I expected to. When I first read how Volume 3: Book 1 was starting out, I was disappointed. It felt like a rehash of old content. Going back to old areas and talking to rangers that I had met before. In practice it was actually a good deal of fun. The quests were pretty quick for the most part. There were some interesting story tidbits which I won’t go into for spoiler reasons. Best of all several of the missions took place in pretty cool instances, one of the neatest was the ice cave in Forochel.

Book 1 was pretty quick, around three or four hours at most, and is entirely solo. There is one skirmish where you can group up but all of the instances are solo instances, and the rest is easy open world stuff.

I’m looking forward to continuing the story, although I could stand to wait a few months for the next book, I still haven’t finished Books 8 and 9 from Volume 2.

This is a non-spoiler post. Please keep the comments spoiler free as well.

I finished Mass Effect 2, and it was even better than the first one!

I’m a reader. I love books. When I’m reading a good story, I find it hard to put down. There’s always a point in the last third of a book where the plot kicks into high gear and starts the downhill rush towards the denouement. I have to be careful about when I get to that point in a book because once I get there I absolutely have to finish it before I can do anything else.

Mass Effect 1 and 2 affect me the same way. I actually started the last mission in ME2 much too late at night and finally had to tear myself away around 2 am but before I actually finished the game. So all day the following day at work, I was counting the hours until I could get back on and finish.

I enjoyed Mass Effect 2 as much as I had hoped to and much more than I expected to. I blame my hesitance to start the game on my lowered expectations and on the crappy marketing leading up to release. All of the talk about a darker tone, and  the awful preview videos with Jack, had me concerned that they were taking Mass Effect more towards a Dragon Age style which I didn’t enjoy much.

Turns out my fears were totally baseless, I enjoyed all of the new characters, including Jack (which I was really surprised about). I was just as (or more actually) emotionally involved in the story. The Mass Effect games are part of a very small group of games (like KOTOR, oddly enough) where my emotional investment in the characters is just as deep as it is when I read a novel. I think it is a combination of “good enough” facial and body animation combined with excellent voice work, good writing, and just enough choice allowed in the dialogue trees. Having fully voiced dialogue for both my character and for non-player characters keeps the immersion level high. Limiting the character customization so that non-player reactions to my character’s appearance is appropriate (don’t refer to me as a boy if I look like I’m 60 years old). With immersion maintained at such a high and consistent level, it is much easier for me to develop a bond with my digital teammates.

So if you are into Science-Fiction, space opera, adventure stories, I highly recommend playing both Mass Effect games. You don’t have to play the first to enjoy the second, but it is a better experience having played both.

Even though I despise DRM, I don’t consider it a good excuse to pirate games.

First there are the ethical considerations. Pirating a game is stealing. If you want to play a game then you should pay for it. If you think it is too expensive, if you don’t like the DRM it comes with, then just don’t play it. I can see using pirated games as demos, but that’s really the only exception to the rule.

Beyond the ethics, there are very good practical reasons not to pirate.

First, you you never know what you’re getting when you download a cracked copy of a game. Key loggers, viruses, root kits, who knows what kind of malware has been dropped into that unlocked copy of Whatever 5. Sure you can limit where you get stuff from and use anti-virus and anti-malware, but that’s no guarantee. Oh, and yeah, I know some people consider certain DRM programs to be viruses or malware, at that point see the ethical responses above.

Second, if you buy a DRMed game and then download a utility to strip it out then the publisher and developer don’t see any impact to their sales. Which means they won’t understand their mistakes. They’ll continue to add DRM layers to their games. One exception to this is Spore, but there’s very few games that will garner that kind of publicity.

So Darren, from Common Sense Gamer, displayed as surprising lack of common sense and allowed me to be on Shut Up We’re Talking episode 58. Seriously, I’ve been excited about this for weeks now. I sent Darren an email after episode 56.5 where he asked for people who wanted to be a guest on the show. Of course, I didn’t think he’d actually reply back.

I had a great time doing the show. Huge thanks to Darren, Karen, and John for letting me talk their ears off, both on and off the air. Usually, I’m talking to myself in the car when I listen to them, so at least this time people in traffic weren’t staring at me.

I saw this Twitter status earlier today from Craig Zinkievich, Executive Producer for Star Trek Online:

As of 2/8 midnight PST: Most time spent in #STO by a player: 182.21 hours. Yeah, that’s right 7.58 DAYS of playtime.

That’s an incredible bit of trivia, and not a healthy achievement for whoever that player is.

Keep in mind that the headstart launch was 1/29 and the retail launch was 2/2. Just to make the math easy, ignore  the following:

• the servers didn’t come up on 1/29 at midnight, so that was not a full 24 hours of playtime
• the server have not had 99.9% uptime

So let’s just say that an absolute maximum amount of time a headstart player could have played is 11 days or 264 hours. That means someone has been playing for at least 69% of the time the game has been live.

Some interesting reading from today, that I wanted to share.

Great STO Blog

The Engines Cannae’ Take It is still pretty new, but is already an excellent resource for any Starfleet captains interested in the details of how best to command their ships and plan their careers. An excellent example is BigBadB’s latest article about Skills, and some very detailed analysis of how to get the best use of your skill points.

Check out his blogroll for some other good STO focused blogs.

Van Hemlock STO Episode and Zink Interview

Randomessa mentions two things that I wanted to highlight.

First, Van Hemlock has an excellent episode about Star Trek and Star Trek Online. They talk about the different series and how each set a different tone, and some of the most popular episodes in the franchise and whether or not they would make good missions in the MMO. It is a good in-depth discussion of the IP and the different strengths of the mediums (television, movies, and games).

Second, there’s also an interesting interview up on Fidgit.com with Craig Zinkievich. These were some of the things I found most interesting in the interview:

• The team is planning to add more exploration and non-combat activities (like diplomacy) over the next year, specifically mentioning first contact missions.
• Some bridge officer AI quirks, “don’t give your bridge officers food, because right now they eat it right away. That’s disappointing if you’re trying to use them as extra storage bags.”
• Acknowledgement that the skill system could use more in depth explanation.
• Respecs should be out in the next one to two months and available through the C-store and earnable in-game.

Most of the interview is stuff I’ve already seen asked and answered other places, but this is the first interview where I’ve seen Craig talk about plans for non-combat missions.

Couldn’t come up with a witty title, especially since this is a real ramble of a post. Lemme know if you have a title suggestion. So…

Lord of the Rings

Turbine has announced their next book release, Volume 3 Book 1: Oath of the Rangers. Aside from the advancement of the epic story quests, it seems to be all skirmishes and crafting recipes. I don’t know what I was hoping for but that wasn’t it. I did read a rumor that Volume 1 will be completely solo-able though which is nice, I only wish I remember where I’d heard that or how reliable the source was.

Star Trek and Champions

Despite what my Twitter says I didn’t actually play STO last night. If you look at my Raptr profile you’ll see I spent 3 minutes in the game because I launched the patcher last night and decided to click on Engage since the launcher said the server was up. I did get the game to launch to a “No logins authorized at this time,” which was enough for Raptr to think I was playing. The best part was a message I got from Blamefulgecko wanting to know how I got in so soon, was accidental but very funny.

No real news on the Champions front as far as the expansion controversy. I played a bit last night and had one disconnect early on but that was it. Crafting still seems to be a problem but only for some specific items (can’t remember which, sorry). The only major irritation from my play session was the camera spin bug. I’m not sure what causes it, but occasionally the camera would start to rotate wildly around my hero. It seemed to happen most often when I was flying. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to stop it by using the mouse look, but still I will be glad when it gets fixed.

Last thing I wanted to mention is there’s a follow up from the STO team regarding upcoming features. Lots of interesting stuff there, especially for Klingon players. For me, the IP location additions are the most interesting. All of the high level stuff is something I won’t be ready to see for quite a while. The most interesting bit though is the last paragraph under the Engage heading.

These updates are entirely free to Star Trek Online subscribers.

Obviously this was included in response to the Champions drama going on. I wonder how much communication is going on between the two teams, because PR-wise they don’t seem to be on the same page. I’m imagining Craig having a little hallway conversation with Bill about his timing.

I took the day off from work yesterday because it was my birthday and played video games all day. With a wife, a 16 month old son, a job, a home, and two dogs, this was a big deal to get a whole day (guilt free) and was very very fun. It isn’t often that you can give yourself time, but that’s what it feels like I did yesterday. I played a about 2 hours of of LotRO and and hour of EVE, but most of my time (nearly 7 hours) was in Champions Online. There also happened to be a big patch yesterday in Champions and it caused some issues.

Lag? Lag. Lag!

I started in Monster Island and was having a lot of problems with rubber banding, freezes, and stutters. I found Millennium City to be a lot smoother (which is counter to some peoples experiences based on the forums). I also did a little crafting and didn’t have any of the item loss some people were complaining about. I don’t remember the client patching anything, but the lag issues did seem to be mostly solved by yesterday evening. I’m planning to pop in tonight and see if Monster Island is still having issues.

As a side note, even in the middle of the day on a week day there were plenty of players on the server. I was able to group up several times for missions within minutes of asking in zone chat.

Paid Expansion Already?

Besides the patch and lag issues, there was also a State of the Game released two days ago. Most of it was interesting to me but not exciting until I got to the part about a new zone, Vibora Bay. I’m not at the cap yet, my main is at level 34, and I’m still doing Monster Island content. I haven’t done the crisis mission for Lemuria yet. Still, new content is always a good thing. The expansion wording that Roper used didn’t even click for me until I was reading through the forum follow-ups and say this one from Daeke. Paid expansion before the game has been out a full year?

Of course the nerd rage on the forums has gone super nova.

My initial reaction was disappointment. When I read the SoG message I assumed that this was a free update. I think partly because Champions now occupies the same position in my mind that City of Heroes used to and CoH always had a lot of free content updates. After some thought though, I’ve gone from disappointment to wait and see. First, I realized that I just paid $20 for a mini-expansion from Turbine. Second, I had skimmed Daeke’s post the first time and missed  a very important not that he used. This expansion is not going to be full box price. Third, there are way too many details still missing to have any kind of valid opinion. All we know right now is Vibora Bay has content for levels 37-40 and that it will cost some amount of money.

So, I’m just going to wait and see. The only thing I’ve really decided in the last few days is I need to not read forums for MMO’s, with the exception of the Dev Tracker, in order to preserver my sanity and positive outlook on life.

The Star Trek Online beta is done, the head-start is tomorrow, and I can’t wait to enlist in Starfleet. I think I remember a forum post saying that the final retail patch would be posted today, so I’m going to run the client tonight and hopefully avoid any long waits for tomorrow. Hey I can dream right?

My previous thoughts on the game haven’t changed. I wasn’t expecting a virtual world sandbox game. I wasn’t expecting Mass Effect style dialog trees. All I wanted was an emotional response when firing a photon torpedo or sending my ship into warp, and I got that. The game has improved a lot since I first started testing in late November. There are still bugs and rough edges to things, but Cryptic has been able to show a lot of improvement in two and a half months. My only disappointment with the game is the linearity of the non-combat missions, I would like to see a little bit in the way of options instead of just: read, click, read, go here, read, click, read, beam out.

I had already decided in December that I was going to play at least the first six months, but based on my open beta experiences I’ve decided to go all in, as they say in poker, and I bought a lifetime account (my third, the others being LotRO and Champions).

Is it a risk? Oh yeah. Will I regret it? Maybe, but not as much as I would regret it if I was still playing in a year and hadn’t bought one. Of course I could have taken the one year sub and then switched to a lifetime next year, but then I would miss out on the playable Borg captain and be paying $60 more for the lifetime plus the $120 for the first year sub. So I’m taking a gamble that I’ll still be playing this time next year. That is a pretty safe bet for me. I’m still not at max level on my first hero in Champions and I didn’t get my first max level in LotRO until a month before Moria came out, so I don’t chew through content that fast.

So, I’m in it for the long haul and if Cryptic can make good on Zinc’s State of the Game from yesterday, then I’ll be a happy player for quite a while.