Excessively Competitive

Making a living just by playing games seems awesome. Unfortunately the chances of this happening are incredibly remote for even the best of players. Either you’d have to be living in South Korea whilst being unbelievably skilled in Starcraft, or be extremely good at whichever FPS is the most popular in North America and Europe. Even then, the chances of making a decent living from the prize money and sponsorships is pretty slim.

Here in Australia, those chances are nil.

After only just failing to win a league in a popular FPS, a few of the people from a top Australian clan posted up photos of themselves microwaving, stabbing or snapping their game discs. They were, apparently, so sick of the game that they couldn’t stand playing it ever again.

I can kind of understand what these people might have felt like, with my somewhat limited experience in competitive gaming. In most of the popular FPS games it becomes a task of perfection through repetition, playing the same five or six maps over and over and over again. Since you’re playing competitively, there are usually only four or so weapons that are even worth using. A lot of the people in the top teams are some of the worst, most arrogant human beings in existence. So it kind of turns into this boring routine of wasting an couple of hours nearly every night with the only good feelings coming from actually winning. Maybe I was in the wrong team. I guess it might be fun with a decent group of people, although from what I’ve witnessed of the top teams constantly disbanding, and with all of the drama going on in competitive forums, it’s pretty debatable.

Fallout 3 Review

I know everyone has already reviewed it, but it’s the game I bought and played this fortnight. So here’s my thoughts.

Installing Fallout 3 was painless and the copy protection is basically just a serial number and disk check, at least as far as I’m aware. Unfortunately the PC version tends to crash every so often, which is always a really awesome way of destroying the atmosphere and my involvement in the game world. Maybe a patch will fix some of those problems.

The graphics are quite pretty. They’re nothing special for a game of 2008, but I don’t really think that graphics has been a major issue in most games for a few years now – at least for me, anyway. One notable point is the massive draw distance, with buildings and terrain standing out from miles away. Being able to see for such a huge distance tends to make the game that much more epic. The animations are a touch jerky but otherwise work well enough. The sounds for all of the guns and enemies are pretty decent and there’s nothing that really detracts from the experience in that regard, besides a few repetitive pieces of speech from the NPC’s. The acting varies a lot, but for the most part it’s not  too bad.

Combat works well enough. It shuffles between a very basic first person shooter mode and VATS, which essentially pauses the game and allows the player to select which enemy they’d like to shoot and where. You only get a certain amount of action points in VATS, and so usually you can only make three attacks. The game goes into slow motion, your shots go off, and it returns back to real time. Generally the points placed in the gun skills improve their accuracy and chance to hit. The non combat skills are fairly practical, such as science (which improves the chance to hack computers), speech, medicine and lockpicking. When the character levels up you put points into whatever skills you’d like and also pick a ‘perk’. The perks are mostly little bonuses such as radiation resistance, small improvements to skills or some more odd ones randomly receiving the help of a mysterious stranger whilst in combat. The very basic real time combat, multiple dialogue options and reliance on stats and skill checks means that Fallout 3 is definitely a role playing game rather than a shooter.

It’s… not really that similar to the old Fallout games. That’s not something that bothers me personally, but fans of the older games might want to keep it in mind when they try playing.

I really liked how Fallout 3 began. Choosing your character’s appearance upon birth, using the children’s book to pick statistics and getting skills through a multiple choice exam called the G.O.A.T was creative and involving. The vault’s inhabitants set the scene well and I found my character’s dad (played by Liam Neeson) to be pretty sympathetic character – one that I actually grew somewhat of an attachment to. There are quite a variety of ways in which the vault section of the game can be played out.

The premise of Fallout 3 is that your character has been sheltered from the effects of a nuclear apocalypse by growing up inside an underground vault. When you turn nineteen, however, you find out that your father is found to have somehow escaped the vault. You are forced to flee, too, before you find yourself out in the wasteland in search of your dad.

Taking that first look at the world after escaping the vault was a really great moment, with the glare of the outside world slowly fading into a view of this huge, desolate wasteland that once was a living, active place before the bombs slaughtered it.

After leaving the vault, I found myself doing a little exploring, including fighting a few raiders in an old schoolhouse, before I checked my map and wandering off to the first major settlement of Megaton. I’m sure it’s been mentioned a thousand times already but you get the option to either destroy Megaton or defuse the nuclear bomb sitting in the middle of it. A lot of the quests have multiple ways in which they can be completed and the speech skill actually comes in handy since it lets you skip some quests altogether if you don’t feel like doing them. Anyway, I played a good character and so the town was still around as I played through.

The first three or four hours flowed along nicely. I thought the few locations I had visited were all pretty unique. A couple of the quests, including deliberately getting radiation poisoning just so you could tell someone what it was like, were pretty amusing. I visited a couple of other settlements and did a quest or two, and came across this rather disturbing little village inhabited by a couple of secretive families seemingly straight out of a 1950′s sitcom. After finding an old factory and exploring a couple of abandoned grocery stores, I decided I was bored with exploring for the moment, and headed off towards the main quest.

I reached the centre of Washington. Then… I began to see a few locations that looked pretty similar. It’s a big world, though, so I didn’t mind… at least until I had realised that I was in a rabbit warren of sewers and subway stations around central D.C. I was assaulted by seemingly endless tunnels of gray rock and rubble that you’re forced to wander through because half the above ground streets are blocked off by ruins. These subways are inevitably filled with ghouls, raiders, mutants or fire breathing ants, and perhaps a container of ammunition or a few medical supplies here and there. In between each subway there was nearly always a whole series of generic enemies to plough through. I hate feeling like I’m grinding in a single player game. If I wanted that I’d be playing an MMO, where grind mechanics are usually far superior. Luckily, the underground grind was broken up with a series of events; a pitched battle against a giant supermutant, locations like the degraded Washington Monument, as well as a good smattering of NPC’s to interact with.

After that the game was awesome for the next five hours or so. Then I found myself in a fairly generic cave full of mutants and once again found myself struggling through another dull section.

I always felt that Fallout 3 tends to be at its best when the combat is spread out. I can’t get myself to play Fallout 3 for more than a couple of hours when it gets stuck inside a cave or subway station that’s full of monsters. After a break I can come back and enjoy myself for a little while before it becomes stale again. Other times, when the developers are more imaginative, the game keeps me engaged enough that I feel almost totally involved in its world. It comes really close to being this truly awesome experience, but Fallout 3 never quite made it for me.

So Fallout 3 isn’t quite the great wonder that many of the major reviews have made it out to be, but nonetheless it’s pretty enjoyable. Definitely one of the better RPG’s to have been released in the last few years.

Fallout 3 Impressions

I’ve played about six hours of Fallout 3 this weekend. It’s a decent game so far.

Fallout 3 isn’t the same as the old Fallout titles. It doesn’t have the same atmosphere, story or general pace as the first or second installments of the series. In Fallout 2, most players would find themselves picking up their first gun – a single bullet pipe rifle – only after having gotten partway through the dungeon in the second town. Just seconds after leaving the Vault in Fallout 3 I found that I had body armor and a helmet, and was armed with a pistol that had a healthy hundred or so bullets to spare. Five minutes after I’d gotten into the wasteland I was fighting several armed bandits instead of fighting ants or rats with a knife.

The Fallout 3 world feels much more crowded, too. There are a few settlements within a five minute walk of Vault 101, rather than a world where it was a couple of days’ worth of travel just to get to the nearest village. The story, too, deviates quite a bit from the old Fallout games and groups like the Brotherhood of Steel or the supermutants aren’t quite like they’re supposed to be.

So… it’s not really a Fallout game. I’m just playing it as if it’s Bethesda Apocalyptic World and ignoring what the game ‘should’ have been, and I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. It’s certainly an RPG instead of an FPS, and the exploration and quests have genuinely been fun.

The fans of Fallout 1 and 2 remind me of myself when it comes to the Resident Evil movies. I really hated those movies. In fact, unless those films were made extremely close to the original storyline I would still hate them. Actually, those films are pretty crap even on their own merit, but you get the idea. I don’t think the hardcore fans of Fallout would have ever been pleased unless Fallout 3 had been an isometric, updated version of the original with a few more quests and cinematics thrown in.

Anyway, I’ll do a proper review in a week.

Dead Space DRM

EA recently announced that the action/horror game, Dead Space, is going to come with a DRM system similar to Spore. Other big titles such as Red Alert 3 are going to ship with the same copy protection.

Dead Space needs to be activated online before the program will even run. It also has a limit of five installations (on different computers or hardware setups) before it’s ‘used up’. Once it has been used up, well, sorry, but you’ll probably have to buy another copy… or run a crack. Bad luck.

But… let’s face it, the average person buying an EA game from the local shops won’t even notice that DRM exists, save for if they try and install it without an Internet connection. They won’t notice and their copy will be long discarded by the time they even get through five installations.

I find the DRM issue annoying enough to change what I purchase. EA managed to tip me towards Fallout 3 instead of Deadspace.

DRM. Not quite cool enough for street protests.

Why does a company like EA even bother having Securom and online activation?

If copy protection such as that found in Spore and Dead Space doesn’t stop piracy, then what’s the point of it? Large developers could believe that it manages to stop a great deal of illegal downloading. I always thought that a CD key provided a big enough hassle to deter some piracy, whilst not being a major impediment to legitimate players – not to mention that games like Spore have been copied in ridiculous numbers. As far as I’m aware Dead Space has already been pirated and is now available on torrents everywhere. The pirated version is arguably superior, too, considering that it doesn’t have any limits on the number of installations.

The other, more plausible explanation is that online activation kills the second-hand market. Nobody really wants to buy a game that quite possibly will not work after a couple of installs. A couple of executives have dubiously complained about second hand games costing them some of their revenue – going so far as to call it a ‘critical situation‘. I think that getting rid of the second hand market seems like a reasonably believable motivation, even moreso than wanting to stop piracy. I think that corporations often go for the piracy angle because it’s a lot easier to attack teenagers on bit-torrent than it is to complain about Bob Smith selling his old copy of Spore to a friend.

In the end we’re talking about corporations. They’ll do whatever fits the requirements of being legal and profitable, regardless of whether it’s good or bad for the end user. The only way I can see that DRM would dwindle was if more sales were lost from a bad reputation than gained through the elimination of piracy and second hand sales. They’ve lost a couple of sales from me, but I’m not exactly the casual audience they’re looking out for.

I had this temporary urge to play a horror game, too.

WotLK Playing Field

In the last week or so there have been a series of pretty cool events in the World of Warcraft leading up to the Lich King expansion. In the last couple of days a new boss has been added to one of the raids, giant floating fortresses have been wandering about and a kind of irritating plague is spreading through the player population, turning them into zombies and occasionally overrunning some of the towns.

Since it’s more ‘fair’ to allow people to see the old engdame before the new is released, Blizzard have been making WoW progressively easier. This is presumably because people ought to be able to see each of the dungeons and raids as the new expansion gets closer and closer. Levels are faster, gold virtually falls from the sky, dungeons have been nerfed and gear is much more accessible than when the first expansion, the Burning Crusade, arrived a couple of years ago.

Apparently new players are getting some sort of triple experience bonus, pulling the time needed to get to the new content down to what I imagine would be ninety hours, give or take. That’s lightning fast compared to most MMO’s.

I took advantage of WoW. I updated the game a week or so ago, renewed my subscription, before spending maybe eight or so hours getting my troll warrior from level 66 to 70. I’ll probably spend another five or ten hours pushing my blacksmithing and cooking skills to the requisite level of 375 for WotLK. In three or four weeks I’ll essentially be on the same footing as those people who spent thousands of hours, sick days and bags of cheetohs on getting all of their shiny purple armor. I feel guilty.

People can get a little bit upset when the rules change to make it easier for new players. I guess they feel like their time has been wasted… moreso than it had been before. Or that they earned their epic gear whilst others are unfairly getting it for free. I actually kind of agree with them. In a sense, it is unfair. They played for five hundred hours after reaching level seventy. I played a hundred hours over six months, then seven last week, and now my character is somehow on an equal footing.

Jarret Cale of Pure Pwnage described an MMO as more of a hobby than a game. Essentially, you play in order to make your character better, even if sometimes it feels a little like work. There are a hundred little projects like getting better gear, obtaining epic flying mounts, upgrading crafting skills and finding rare pets, tabards or titles that all take a good deal of time in the same way that building a model plane or writing an irrelevant blog takes time. I found myself thinking about what skills I wanted to learn or what gear I could realistically get as I walked to work or took a shower. My attention span for most other games begins and ends at the computer. Adding ten more levels every couple of years makes it feel more like a time sink than a hobby, though.

Of course the people who played obsessively did get to see all of the content first, and were able to show off to everyone for a good year or so before Blizzard decided to make it easy for the rest of us. Actually, most of them are probably looking forward to doing something different than endlessly running the same three or four raids all the time. So I shouldn’t feel all that guilty. Probably.